Dinky-Dunk, as he had warned us, could not get home for the holidays. But he surprised me by sending a really wonderful box for the kiddies, and even a gorgeous silver-mounted collar for Scotty. Susie is up again, but she is still feeling a bit listless. I heard Gershom informing her to-night that her blood travels at the rate of seven miles per hour and that if all the energy of Niagara Falls were utilized it could supply the world with seven million horse-power. I do wish Gershom would get over trying to pat the world on the head, instead of shaking hands with it! I’m afraid I’m losing my lilt. I can’t understand why I should keep feeling as blue as indigo. I am a well of acid and a little sister to the crab-apple. I think I’ll make Susie come down so we can humanize 252 ourselves with a little music. For I feel like a Marie Bashkirtseff with a bilious attack....
Whinstane Sandy has just come in with Peter’s box, two days late. I felt sure that Peter would not utterly forget us. There is still a great deal of shouting down in the kitchen, where that most miraculous of boxes has been unpacked. As for myself, I’ve had a hankering to be alone, to think things over. But my meditations don’t seem to get me anywhere.... Dinkie has just come up to show me his brand-new bridle for Buntie. It is a magnificent bridle, as shiny and jingly as any lad could desire. I tried to get him to put it down, so that I could draw him over close to me and talk to him. But Dinkie is too excited for any such demonstration. He’s beginning, I’m afraid, to consider emotion a bit unmanly. He seems to be losing his craving to be petted and pampered. There are times, I can see, when he desires his fence-lines to be respected.
Sunday the Twenty-Ninth
Nearly six weeks, I notice, have slipped by. For a month and a half, apparently, the impulse to air my troubles went hibernating with the bears. Yet it has been a mild winter, so far, with very little snow and a great deal of sunshine—a great deal of sunshine which doesn’t elate me as it ought. I can’t remember who it was said a happy people has no history. But that’s not true of a happy woman. It’s when her heart is full that she makes herself heard, that she sings like a lark to the world. When she’s wretched, she retires with her grief....
I haven’t been altogether wretched, it’s true, just as I haven’t been altogether hilarious, but it disturbs me to find that for a month and a half I haven’t written a line in this, the mottled old book of my life. It’s not that the last month or two has been empty, for no months are really empty. They have to be 254 filled with something. But there are times, I suppose, when lives lie fallow, the same as fields lie fallow, times when the days drag like harrow-teeth across the perplexed loam of our soul and nothing comes of it at all. Not, I repeat, that I have been momentously unhappy. It’s more that a sort of sterilizing indifferency took possession of me and made the little ups and downs of existence as unworthy of record as the ups and downs of the waves on the deadest shores of the Dead Sea. It’s not that I’m idle, and it’s not that I’m old, and it’s not that there’s anything wrong with this disappointingly healthy body of mine. But I rather think I need a change of some kind. I even envy Susie, who has ambled on to the Coast and is staying with the Lougheeds in Victoria, playing golf and picking winter roses and writing back about her trips up Vancouver Island and her approaching journey down into California.
“What do we know of the New World,” she parodied in her last letter that came to me, “who only the old East know?” Then she goes on to say: “I’m just back from a West Coast trip on the roly-poly Maquinna and if my thoughts go wobbly and my 255 hand goes crooked it’s because my head is so prodigiously full of
and alas, also Seasickness, that I can’t think straight!”