A chill, uncomfortable laughter seemed to fill the inner mind through which the debate passed, while all the time she was apparently looking at the landscape, and chatting with her brother or Delaine. She fell into an angry contempt for that mood of imaginative delight in which she had journeyed through Canada so far. What! treat a great nation in the birth as though it were there for her mere pleasure and entertainment? Make of it a mere spectacle and pageant, and turn with disgust from the notion that you, too, could ever throw in your lot with it, fight as a foot-soldier in its ranks, on equal terms, for life and death!
She despised herself. And yet--and yet! She thought of her mother--her frail, refined, artistic mother; of a hundred subtleties and charms and claims, in that world she understood, in which she had been reared; of all that she must leave behind, were she asked, and did she consent, to share the life of a Canadian of Anderson's type. What would it be to fail in such a venture! To dare it, and then to find life sinking in sands of cowardice and weakness! Very often, and sometimes as though by design, Anderson had spoken to her of the part to be played by women in Canada; not in the defensive, optimistic tone of their last walk together, but forbiddingly, with a kind of rough insistence. Substantial comfort, a large amount of applied science--that could be got. But the elegancies and refinements of English rich life in a prairie farm--impossible! A woman who marries a Canadian farmer, large or small, must put her own hands to the drudgery of life, to the cooking, sewing, baking, that keep man--animal man--alive. A certain amount of rude service money can command in the Northwest; but it is a service which only the housewife's personal coöperation can make tolerable. Life returns, in fact, to the old primitive pattern; and a woman counts on the prairie according as "she looketh well to the ways of her household and eateth not the bread of idleness."
Suddenly Elizabeth perceived her own hands lying on her lap. Useless bejewelled things! When had they ever fed a man or nursed a child?
Under her gauze veil she coloured fiercely. If the housewife, in her primitive meaning and office, is vital to Canada, still more is the house-mother. "Bear me sons and daughters; people my wastes!" seems to be the cry of the land itself. Deep in Elizabeth's being there stirred instincts and yearnings which life had so far stifled in her. She shivered as though some voice, passionate and yet austere, spoke to her from this great spectacle of mountain and water through which she was passing.
"There he is!" cried Philip, craning his head to look ahead along the train.
Anderson stood waiting for them on the Field platform. Very soon he was seated beside her, outside the car, while Philip lounged in the doorway, and Delaine inside, having done his duty to the Kicking Horse Pass, was devoting himself to a belated number of the "Athenæum" which had just reached him.
Philip had stored up a string of questions as to the hunting of goat in the Rockies, and impatiently produced them. Anderson replied, but, as Elizabeth immediately perceived, with a complete lack of his usual animation. He spoke with effort, occasionally stumbling over his words. She could not help looking at him curiously, and presently even Philip noticed something wrong.
"I say, Anderson!--what have you been doing to yourself? You look as though you had been knocking up."
"I have been a bit driven this week," said Anderson, with a start. "Oh, nothing! You must look at this piece of line."