be
thrown off, and the shouting and shooting of the cow punchers would
proclaim the West as it really was.

Very slowly it dawned upon Mrs. Hardy that this respectable, thriving
city, with its well dressed, properly mannered people, its public
spirit, its aggressiveness, its churches and theatres and schools, its
law and order--and its afternoon teas ("My dear, who would have thought
it possible?" She half expected a cowboy to ride in and overthrow the
china)--very slowly it dawned upon her that this, after all, was the
real West; sincere, earnest; crude, perhaps; bare, certainly; the scars
of its recent battle with the wilderness still fresh upon its person;
lacking the finish that only time can give to a landscape or a
civilization; but lacking also the mouldiness, the mustiness, the
insufferable artificiality of older communities. And the atmosphere!
Day after day brought its cloudless sky, the weather, for once, having
failed to observe the rule of contraries; evening after evening flooded
valley and hilltop with its deluge of golden glory; night after night a
crisp temperature sent her reaching for comforters. Sleep? She felt
that she had never slept before. Eat? Her appetite was insatiable;
all day long she lived in a semi-intoxication born of an unaccustomed
altitude. And, best of all, something had happened to her cough; she
did not know just what or when, but presently she discovered it was
gone. Even Mrs. Hardy, steeped for sixty years in a life of precedent
and rule and caste, began to catch the enthusiasm of a new land where
precedent and rule and caste are something of a handicap.

"We must buy a home," she said to Irene. "We cannot afford to continue
living at an hotel, and we must have our own home. You must look up a
responsible dealer whose advice we can trust in a matter of this kind."

And was it remarkable that Irene Hardy should think at once of the firm
of Conward & Elden? It was not. She had, indeed, been thinking of a
member of that firm ever since the decision to move to the West. She
had felt a peculiar hesitation about enquiring openly for Dave Elden,
but, upon meeting a newspaper woman in the person of Miss Morrison she
had voiced the great question with an apparent unconcern which did not
in the slightest mislead the acute Roberta. It is the business of
newspaper people to know things and people, and it seemed to Irene that
she could ask such a question of Miss Morrison in a