female-of-the-species affections are
involved. I'm no better, I'm afraid, than the Bengal tigress which
Dinky-Dunk once intimated I was, the Bengal tigress who will battle so
unreasoningly for her offspring. It may be natural in mothers, whether
they wear fur or feathers or lisle-thread stockings--but it worries
me. I was an engine running wild. And when you run wild you are apt to
run into catastrophe.

_Friday the Seventh_

Dinky-Dunk is on his dignity. He has put a fence around himself to
keep me at a distance, the same as he puts a fence around his
haystacks to keep off the cattle. We are coolly polite to each other,
but that is as far as it goes. There is something radically wrong with
this home, as a home, but I seem helpless to put the matter right.
It's about all I have left, in this life of mine, but I'm in some way
failing in my duty as a house-wife. "Home" is a beautiful word, and
home-life should be beautiful. Any sacrifice and any concession a
woman is willing to make to keep that home, and to keep ugliness out
of it, ought to be well considered by the judge of her final
destinies. I'm ready to do my part, but I don't know where to begin.
I'm depressed by a teasing sense of frustration, not quite tangible
enough to fight, like cobwebs across your face. It's not easy to carry
around the milk of human kindness after they've pretty well kicked the
bottom out of your can!

Torrid and tiring are these almost endless summer days. But it's what
the grain needs, and who am I to look this gift-horse of heat in the
face. Yet there are two things, I must confess, in which the prairie
is sadly lacking. One is trees; and the other is shade, the cool green
sun-filtering shade of woodlands where birds can sing and mossy little
brooks can babble. I've been longing all day for just an hour up in an
English cherry tree, with the pectoral smell of the leaves against my
face and the chance of eating at least half my own weight of fresh
fruit. But even in the matter of its treelessness, I'm told, the
prairie is reforming. There are men living who remember when there
were no trees west of Brandon, except in the coulees and the
river-bottoms. Now that fire no longer runs wild, however, the trees
are creeping in, mile by mile and season by season. Already the
eastern line of natural bush country reaches to about ten miles from
Regina two hundred miles west. Oxbow and Estevan, Dinky-Dunk once told
me, had no trees what