it implies, is made ready and
performed beyond their vision, and they have no balky pumps to prime
and no fires to build, and they'd probably be quite disturbed to think
that their roasts came from a slaughter-house with bloody floors and
that their breakfast rolls, instead of coming ready-made into the
world, are mixed and molded in bake-rooms where men work sweating by
night, stripped to the waist, like stokers.

_Wednesday the Second_

Dinky-Dunk's letter, which reached me Monday, was very short and
almost curt. It depressed me for a day. I tried to fight against that
feeling, when it threatened to return yesterday, and was at Peter's
piano shouting to the kiddies:

"Coon, Coon, Coon, I wish my color'd fade!
Coon, Coon, Coon, I'd like a different shade!"

when Struthers carried in to me, with a sort of triumphant and
tight-lipped I-told-you-so air, a copy of the morning's _Los Angeles
Examiner_. She had it folded so that I found myself confronting a
picture of Lady Alicia Newland, Lady Alicia in the "Teddy-Bear" suit
of an aviator, with a fur-lined leather jacket and helmet and heavy
gauntlets and leggings and the same old audacious look out of the
quietly smiling eyes, which were squinting a little because of the
sunlight.

Lady Allie, I found on perusing the letter-press, had been flying with
some of the North Island officers down in San Diego Bay. And now she
and the Right Honorable Lieutenant-Colonel Brereton Ainsley-Brook, of
the British Imperial Commission to Canada, were to attempt a flight to
Kelly Field Number Two, at San Antonio, in Texas, in a De Haviland
machine. She had told the _Examiner_ reporter who had caught her as
she stood beside a naval sea-plane, that she "loved" flying and loved
taking a chance and that her worst trouble was with nose-bleed, which
she'd get over in time, she felt sure. And if the Texas flight was a
success she would try to arrange for a flight down to the Canal at the
same time that the Pacific fleet comes through from Colon.

"Isn't that 'er, all over?" demanded Struthers, forgetting her place
and her position and even her aspirate in the excitement of the
moment. But I handed back the paper without comment. For a day,
however, Lady Allie has loomed large in my thoughts.

_Sunday the Thirteenth_

It will be two weeks to-morrow since I've had a line from Dinky-Dunk.
The world about m