eye. It's
no wonder poor old Dinky-Dunk nearly broke his neck trying to teach
her to ride astride. But I intend to give her ladyship an inkling,
before long, that I'm not quite so stupid as I seem to be. She mustn't
imagine she can "vamp" my Kaikobad with impunity. It's a case of any
port in a storm, I suppose, for she has to practise on somebody. But I
must say she looks well on horseback and can lay claim to a poise that
always exacts its toll of respect. She rides hard, though I imagine
she would be unwittingly cruel to her mount. Yet she has been more
offhanded and friendly, the last two or three times she has dropped
over to the shack, and she is kind to the kiddies, especially Dinkie.
She seems genuinely and unaffectedly fond of him. As for me, she
thinks I'm hard, I feel sure, and is secretly studying me--trying to
decipher, I suppose, what her sainted cousin could ever see in me to
kick up a dust about!

Lady Allie's London togs, by the way, make me feel rather shoddy and
slattern. I intend to swing in a little stronger for personal
adornment, as soon as we get things going again. When a woman gives
up, in that respect, she's surely a goner. And I may be a hard-handed
and slabsided prairie huzzy, but there was a time when I stood beside
the big palms by the fountain in the conservatory of Prince Ernest de
Ligne's Brussels house in the _Rue Montoyer_ and the Marquis of
What-Ever-His-Name-Was bowed and set all the orders on his chest
shaking when he kissed my hand and proclaimed that I was the most
beautiful woman in Belgium!

Yes, there was such a time. But it was a long, long time ago, and I
never thought then I'd be a rancher's wife with a barrel-churn to
scald out once a week and a wheezy old pump to prime in the morning
and a little hanging garden of Babylon full of babies to keep warm and
to keep fed and to keep from falling on their boneless little cocos! I
might even have married Theobald Gustav von Brockdorff and turned into
an embassy ball lizard and ascended into the old family landau of his
aunt the baroness, to disport along the boulevards therein very much
like an oyster on the half-shell. I might have done all that, and I
might not. But it's all for the best, as the greatest pessimist who
ever drew the breath of life once tried to teach in his _Candide_. And
in my career, as I have already written, there shall be no jeremiads.

_Sunday the Nineteenth_

I've been t