The reader is asked to believe that this book was designed and largely written before August, 1914.
Goosequill.
Toronto, November 1st, 1915.
AS OTHERS SEE US
BEING THE DIARY OF A CANADIAN DEBUTANTE
December 15th.
Mumsie is a dear, and I am going to put all about her in this diary. Mumsie says I am an old-fashioned girl (how little she knows me!), but I’ll be old-fashioned enough anyhow to keep a diary. It will be useful to read about the people, and parties, and things I’m going to enjoy. Yes, enjoy is the word. Dances and afternoon teas, and those things the rich people do, I’m going to have my share of. I’m glad I’m a girl, especially when one has such a good aunt as Mumsie. She was nothing more than a friend of my mother—the mother I never knew. And, I am sure, the best of friends!
Just to think I am really to spend a winter in this great Canadian City! I shall call it the City of Mammon. After my village home that seems the only name for it, and there is evidence of wealth everywhere. I almost gasp when I think of what some things I see must have cost, the silk dresses, the great hats with ostrich plumes, the motors. And I must confess to being dazed when I came out of the station. The bells clanged so loudly and the engines puffed as if they wished to specially frighten me; but they didn’t, that is, not much. Perhaps it is that the station held the noises in under its great, glass roof; but the noise and the buffeting, and the many people in a hurry made a strange confusion. At home the station roof is the vault of Heaven, so that we score sometimes in our village. And when we got into the street the cars, the motors, and the lights flashing here and there—it was all so fairy-like and heavenly that—Oh! it is good to be alive.
Mumsie has given me such a big room with an outlook over the street. I feel almost as Cinderella must have felt when at the Prince’s Ball before the midnight bell. I wonder if I shall be asked to any balls! But of course I shall. If Uncle should try to be an old fogey—but he won’t.
That is enough to write about for the first day. No, I must put down more about Mumsie. When she met me at the station and took me in her arms and kissed me, it seemed as if her heart opened and I fell right in; and when she spoke I felt as if I had known her voice all my life. She had a hundred things to ask about myself: how she thought of them all I can’t imagine. She is full of fun, with lots of amusing stories, or at least she seems to make fun out of almost anything. She has reddish hair—a poet would no doubt call it golden—which she does like the Queen, and her voice when she gets talking is generally loud, though the louder it gets the nicer it sounds, it is so cheery. My uncle, her husband, Mr. George Somers, is a largish man with roast-beef cheeks and gray hair, though he is not the least bit old looking. He has a straight nose, a full and polished forehead, and a cropped, white moustache. He is a lawyer, and has a voice for humbugging with. I like him, and there is a twinkle in his eye.