and trek off to
California. Then, as I sat studying Dinkie, I countermanded that wish.
For its fulfillment would bring loneliness to the heart of my
laddie--and loneliness is hell! So, instead, I struggled as best I
could to banish all thought of the matter from my mind. But it was
only half a success. I remembered that Gershom himself had been going
about as abstracted as an ant-eater and as gloomy as a crow, during
the last week; and I kept sniffing something unpropitious up-wind. I
even hoped that Dinkie would return to the subject, as children with a
secret have the habit of doing. But he has been as tight-lipped on the
matter as his reticent old dad might have been.

_Wednesday the Fifteenth_

I got an altogether unlooked-for Valentine yesterday. It was a brief
but a significant letter from Dinky-Dunk, telling me that he had
"taken over" the Goodhue house in Mount Royal and asking me if I
intended to be its mistress. He has bought the house, apparently,
completely furnished and is getting ready to move into it the first
week in March.

The whole thing has rather taken my breath away. I don't object to an
ultimatum, but I do dislike to have it come like a bolt from the blue.
I have arrived at my Rubicon, all right, and about everything that's
left of my life, I suppose, will hang on my decision. I don't know
whether to laugh or to cry, to be horrified or hilarious. At one
moment I have a tendency to emulate Marguerite doing the Jewel-Song in
_Faust_. "This isn't _me_! This isn't _me_!" I keep protesting to
myself. But Marguerite, I know, would never be so ungrammatical. And
then I begin to foresee difficulties. The mere thought of leaving Casa
Grande tears my heart. When we go away, as that wise man of Paris
once said, we die a little. This will always seem my home. I could
never forsake it utterly. I dread to forsake it for even a portion of
each year. I am a part of the prairie, now, and I could never be
entirely happy away from it. And to accept that challenge--for however
one may look at it, it remains a challenge--and go to the new home in
Calgary would surely be another concession. And I have been conceding,
conceding, for the sake of my children. How much more can I concede?

Yet, when all is said and done, I am one of a family. I am not a free
agent. I am chained to the oar for life. When we link up with the race
we have more than the little ring of our own Ego to remember. It is
not, as Dinky-