g when I pulled the hat-pin out of my old gray
Stetson yesterday, uncovered my head, and looked straight up into the
blue firmament above me. Then I said, "Thank you, God, for such a
beautiful day!"

Dinky-Dunk promptly said that I was blasphemous--he's so strict and
solemn! But as I stared up into the depths of that intense opaline
light, so clear, so pure, I realized how air, just air and nothing else,
could leave a scatter-brained lady like me half-seas over. Only it's a
champagne that never leaves you with a headache the next day!

_Saturday the Twenty-fourth_

Dinky-Dunk, who seems intent on keeping my mind occupied, brought me
home a bundle of old magazines last night. They were so frayed and
thumbed-over that some of the pages reminded me of well-worn bank-notes.
I've been reading some of the stories, and they all seem silly.
Everybody appears to be in love with somebody else's wife. Then the
people are all divided so strictly into two classes, the good and the
bad! As for the other man's wife, prairie-life would soon knock that
nonsense out of people. There isn't much room for the Triangle in a
two-by-four shack. Life's so normal and natural and big out here that a
Pierre Loti would be kicked into a sheep-dip before he could use up his
first box of face-rouge! You want your own wife, and want her so bad
you're satisfied. Not that Dinky-Dunk and I are so goody-goody! We're
just healthy and human, that's all, and we'd never do for fiction.
After meals we push away the dishes and sit side by side, with our arms
across each other's shoulders, full of the joy of life, satisfied,
happy, healthy-minded, now and then a little Rabelaisian in our talk,
meandering innocent-eyed through those earthier intimacies which most
married people seem to face without shame, so long as the facing is done
in secret. We don't seem ashamed of that terribly human streak in us.
And neither of us is bad, at heart. But I know we're not like those
magazine characters, who all seem to have Florida-water instead of red
blood in their veins, and are so far, far away from life.

Yet even that dip into politely erotic fiction seemed to canalize my
poor little grass-grown mind into activity, and Diddums and I sat up
until the wee sma' hours discoursing on life and letters. He started me
off by somewhat pensively remarking that all women seem to want to be
intellectual and have a _salon_.

"No, Dinky-Dunk, I don't want a _salon_," I pr