t his fault--is mine. In Europe we loved the same
things; his pleasure kindled mine. But here he enjoys nothing that I
enjoy; he is longing for a tiresome day to end, when my heart is just
singing for delight. For it is not only Canada in the large that holds
me, but all its dear, human, dusty, incoherent detail--all its clatter
of new towns and spreading farms--of pushing railways and young
parliaments--of roadmaking and bridgemaking--of saw-mills and lumber
camps--detail so different from anything I have ever discussed with
Arthur Delaine before. Some of it is ugly, I know--I don't care! It is
like a Rembrandt ugliness--that only helps and ministers to a stronger
beauty, the beauty of prairie and sky, and the beauty of the human
battle, the battle of blood and brain, with the earth and her forces.

"'_Enter these enchanted woods, ye who dare!_'"

"There is a man here--a Mr. George Anderson, of whom I told you
something in my last letter--who seems to embody the very life of this
country, to be the prairie, and the railway, and the forest--their very
spirit and avatar. Personally, he is often sad; his own life has been
hard; and yet the heart of him is all hope and courage, all delight too
in the daily planning and wrestling, the contrivance and the
cleverness, the rifling and outwitting of Nature--that makes a
Canadian--at any rate a Western Canadian. I suppose he doesn't know
anything about art. Mr. Arthur seems to have nothing in common with him;
but there is in him that rush and energy of life, from which, surely,
art and poetry spring, when the time is ripe.

"Don't of course imagine anything absurd! He is just a young Scotch
engineer, who seems to have made some money as people do make money
here--quickly and honestly--and is shortly going into Parliament. They
say that he is sure to be a great man. To us--to Philip and me, he has
been extremely kind. I only meant that he seems to be in place here--or
anywhere, indeed, where the world is moving; while Mr. Arthur, in
Canada, is a walking anachronism. He is out of perspective; he
doesn't fit.

"You will say, that if I married him, it would not be to live in Canada,
and once at home again, the old estimates and 'values' would reassert
themselves. But in a sense--don't be alarmed--I shall always live in
Canada. Or, rather, I shall never be quite the same again; and Mr.
Arthur would find me a restless, impracticable, discontented woman.

"Would it not really be k