our district nursing and our motherhood clubs and our rural phones
and our organized letting in of light and passing on of knowledge. We
are not so overburdened as those nobler women who went before us. But,
oh, pioneers along these lonely northern trails, I salute you and
honor you for your courage! Your greatness will never be known. It
will be seen only in the great country which you gave up your lives to
bring to birth!

_Wednesday the Twenty-Seventh_

What weather-cocks we are! My blue Monday is over and done with, this
is a crystalline winter day with all the earth at peace with itself,
and I've just had a letter from Peter asking if I could take care of
his sister's girl, Susie Mumford, until after Christmas. The Mumfords,
it seems, are going through the divorce-mill, and Susie's mother is
anxious that her one and only child should be afar from the scene when
the grist of liberty is a-grinding.

I know nothing of Susie except what Peter has told me, that she is not
yet nineteen, that she is intelligent, but obstreperous, and much
wiser than she pretends to be, that the machinery of life has always
run much too smoothly about her for her own good, and that a couple of
months of prairie life might be the means of introducing her to her
own soul.

That's all I know of Susie, but I shall welcome her to Casa Grande.
I'll be glad to see a city girl again, to talk over face-creams and
the _Follies_ and Tchaikowsky and brassieres and Strindberg with. And
I'll be glad to do a little toward repaying big-hearted old Peter for
all his kindnesses of the past. Susie may be both sophisticated and
intractable, but I await her with joy. She seems almost the answer to
my one big want.

But Casa Grande, I have been realizing, will have to be refurbished
for its coming guest. We have grown a bit shoddy about the edges here.
It's hard to keep a house spick and span, with two active-bodied
children running about it. And my heart, I suppose, has not been in
that work of late. But I've been on a tour of inspection, and I
realize it's time to reform. So Struthers and I are about to doll up
these dilapidated quarters of ours. And I intend to have my dolorously
neglected Guest Room (for such I used to call it) done over before the
arrival of Susie....

I rode over to the Teetzels' this afternoon, to explain about our
cattle getting through on their land. It was the road-workers who
broke down the Teetzel fence, to squat o