e
result is that she looks whiter than ever this morning and ate very
little of Struthers' really splendiferous breakfast. But she made a
valorous enough effort to be blithe and has rambled about Casa Grande
with the febrile, quick curiosity of a young setter, making friends
with the animals and for the first time in her life picking an egg out
of a nest. I was afraid, at first, that she was going to complain
about the quietness of existence out here, for our pace must seem a
slow one, after New York. But Susie says the one thing she wants is
peace. It's not often a girl not yet out of her teens makes any such
qualified demand on life. I can't help feeling that the break-up of
her family must be depressing her more than she pretends. She speaks
about it in a half-joking way, however, and said this morning: "Dad
certainly deserves a little freedom!" We sat for an hour at the
breakfast-table, pow-wowing about everything under the blessed sun.

In some ways Susie is a very mature woman, for nineteen and
three-quarters. She is also an exceptionally companionable one. She
has a sort of lapis-lazuli eye with paler streaks in the iris, like
banded agate. It is a brooding eye, with a great deal of beauty in it.
And she has a magnolia-white skin which one doesn't often see on the
prairie. It's not the sort of skin, in fact, which could last very
long on the open range. It's the sort that's had too much bevel plate
between it and the buffeting winds of the world. But it's lovely to
look upon, especially when it's touched with its almost imperceptible
shell-pink of excitement as it was this afternoon when Susie climbed
on Buntie and tried a canter or two about the corrals. Susie, I
noticed, rode well. I couldn't quite make out why her riding made me
at once think of Theobald Gustav. But she explained, later, that she
had been taught by a German riding-master--and then I understood.

But I must not overlook Gershom, who duly donned his Sunday best in
honor of Susie's arrival and who is already undertaking to educate the
brooding-eyed young lady from the East. He explained to her that there
were eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles of Canada still
unexplored, and Susie said: "Then lead me into the most far-away part
of it!" And when he told her, during their first meal together, that
the human brain was estimated to contain half a billion cells and that
the number of brain impressions collected by an average person during