Dinky-Dunk’s letter, which reached me Monday, was very short and almost curt. It depressed me for a day. I tried to fight against that feeling, when it threatened to return yesterday, and was at Peter’s piano shouting to the kiddies:

when Struthers carried in to me, with a sort of triumphant and tight-lipped I-told-you-so air, a copy of the morning’s Los Angeles Examiner. She had it folded so that I found myself confronting a picture of Lady Alicia Newland, Lady Alicia in the “Teddy-Bear” suit of an aviator, with a fur-lined leather jacket and helmet and heavy gauntlets and leggings and the same old audacious look out of the quietly smiling eyes, which were squinting a little because of the sunlight.

Lady Allie, I found on perusing the letter-press, had been flying with some of the North Island officers down in San Diego Bay. And now she and the Right Honorable Lieutenant-Colonel Brereton Ainsley-Brook, of the British Imperial Commission to Canada, were to attempt a flight to Kelly Field Number Two, at San Antonio, in Texas, in a De Haviland machine. She had told the Examiner reporter who had caught her as she stood beside a naval sea-plane, that she “loved” flying and loved taking a chance and that her worst trouble was with nose-bleed, which she’d get over in time, she felt sure. And if the Texas flight was a success she would try to arrange for a flight down to the Canal at the same time that the Pacific fleet comes through from Colon.

“Isn’t that ’er, all over?” demanded Struthers, forgetting her place and her position and even her aspirate in the excitement of the moment. But I handed back the paper without comment. For a day, however, Lady Allie has loomed large in my thoughts.