m with her
infantine gazes. Then Gershom--Heaven bless his scholastic old
high-browed solemnity--has just assured me that Dinkie betrays many
evidences of an exceptionally bright mind.

_Friday the Second_

My husband yesterday accused me of getting moss-backed. He had been
harping on the city string again and asked me if I intended to live
and die a withered beauty on a back-trail ranch.

That "withered beauty" hurt, though I did my best to ignore it, for
the time at least. And Dinky-Dunk went on to say that it struck him as
one of life's little ironies that _I_ should want to stick to the sort
of life we were leading, remembering what I'd come from.

"Dinky-Dunk," I told him, "it's terribly hard to explain exactly how I
feel about it all. I suppose I could never make you see it as I see
it. But it's a feeling like loyalty, loyalty to the land that's given
us what we have. And it's also a feeling of disliking to see one old
rule repeating itself: what has once been a crusade becoming merely a
business. To turn and leave our land now, it seems to me, would make
us too much like those soulless soil-robbers you used to rail at, like
those squatters who've merely squeezed out what they could and have
gone on, like those land-miners who take all they can get and stand
ready to put nothing back. Why, if we were all like that, we'd have no
country here. We'd be a wilderness, a Barren Grounds that went from
the Border up to the Circle. But there's something bigger than that
about it all. I love the prairie. Just why it is, I don't know. It's
too fundamental to be fashioned into words, and I never realized how
deep it was until I went back to the city that time. One can just say
it, and let it go at that: _I love the prairie._ It isn't merely its
bigness, just as it isn't altogether its freedom and its openness.
Perhaps it's because it keeps its spirit of the adventurous. I love it
the same as my children love _The Arabian Nights_ and _The Swiss
Family Robinson_. I thought it was mostly cant, once, that cry about
being next to nature, but the more I know about nature the more I feel
with Pope that naught but man is vile, to speak as impersonally, my
dear Diddums, as the occasion will permit. I'm afraid I'm like that
chickadee that flew into the bunk-house and Whinnie caught and put in
a box-cage for Dinkie. I nearly die at the thought of being cooped up.
I want clean air and open space about me."

"I never dreamed