This afternoon, when I wandered into the study, I observed Dinkie stooping over a Chesterfield pillow with his right hand upraised in a perplexingly dramatic manner. He turned scarlet when he saw me standing there watching him. But the question in my eyes did not escape him.
“I was pr’tendin’ to be King Arthur when he found out Guinevere was in love with Launcelot,” he rather lamely explained as he walked away to the window and stood staring out over the prairie. But for the life of me I can’t understand what should have turned his thoughts into that particular channel 121 of romance. Those are matters with which the young and the innocent should have nothing to do. They are matters, in fact, which it behooves even the old and the wary to eschew.
Sunday the Sixteenth
It seems strange, in such golden summer weather, that every man and woman and child on this sunbathed footstool of God shouldn’t be sanely and supremely happy.... My husband, I am glad to say, is once more back in his home. And I have been realizing, the last few days, that home is an empty and foolish place without its man about. It’s a ship without a captain, a clan without a chief. Yet I found it both depressing and humbling to be brought once more face to face with that particular fact.
Dinky-Dunk, on the other hand, has come back with both an odd sense of elation and an odd sense of estrangement. He has taken on a vague something which I find it impossible to define. He is blither and at the same time he is more solemnly abstracted. And he protests that his journey was a success.
“I’m going to ride two horses, from now on,” he announced to me this morning. “I’ve got my chance 123 and I’m going to grab it. I’ve swapped my Buckhorn lots for some inside Calgary stuff and I’m lumping everything that’s left of my Coast deal for a third-interest in those Barcona coal-fields. There’s a quarter of a million waiting there for the people with money enough to swing it. And I’m going to edge in while it’s still open.”
“But is it possible to ride two horses?” I asked, waywardly depressed by all this new-found optimism.
“It’s got to be possible, until we find out which horse is the better traveler,” announced Dinky-Dunk. Then he added, without caring to meet my eye: “And I can’t say I see much promise of action out of this particular end of the team.”