that I could draw
him over close to me and talk to him. But Dinkie is too excited for
any such demonstration. He's beginning, I'm afraid, to consider
emotion a bit unmanly. He seems to be losing his craving to be petted
and pampered. There are times, I can see, when he desires his
fence-lines to be respected.

_Sunday the Twenty-Ninth_

Nearly six weeks, I notice, have slipped by. For a month and a half,
apparently, the impulse to air my troubles went hibernating with the
bears. Yet it has been a mild winter, so far, with very little snow
and a great deal of sunshine--a great deal of sunshine which doesn't
elate me as it ought. I can't remember who it was said a happy people
has no history. But that's not true of a happy woman. It's when her
heart is full that she makes herself heard, that she sings like a lark
to the world. When she's wretched, she retires with her grief....

I haven't been altogether wretched, it's true, just as I haven't been
altogether hilarious, but it disturbs me to find that for a month and
a half I haven't written a line in this, the mottled old book of my
life. It's not that the last month or two has been empty, for no
months are really empty. They have to be filled with something. But
there are times, I suppose, when lives lie fallow, the same as fields
lie fallow, times when the days drag like harrow-teeth across the
perplexed loam of our soul and nothing comes of it at all. Not, I
repeat, that I have been momentously unhappy. It's more that a sort of
sterilizing indifferency took possession of me and made the little ups
and downs of existence as unworthy of record as the ups and downs of
the waves on the deadest shores of the Dead Sea. It's not that I'm
idle, and it's not that I'm old, and it's not that there's anything
wrong with this disappointingly healthy body of mine. But I rather
think I need a change of some kind. I even envy Susie, who has ambled
on to the Coast and is staying with the Lougheeds in Victoria, playing
golf and picking winter roses and writing back about her trips up
Vancouver Island and her approaching journey down into California.

"What do we know of the New World," she parodied in her last letter
that came to me, "who only the old East know?" Then she goes on to
say: "I'm just back from a West Coast trip on the roly-poly _Maquinna_
and if my thoughts go wobbly and my hand goes crooked it's because my
head is so prodigiously full of

SEALS
SALMON
SUN