riend, Peter
Ketley. The page is going to be turned over, the candle snuffed out,
and the singing birds of my freedom silenced. I have met my Rubicon,
and it must be crossed. But last night, for the first time in a month,
I plastered enough cold cream on my nose to make me look like a
buttered muffin, and rubbed enough almond-oil meal on my arms to make
them look like a miller's. And I've been asking myself if I'm the
sedate old lady life has been trying to make me. There are certain
Pacific Islands, Gershom tells me, where the climate is so stable that
the matter of weather is never even mentioned, where the people who
bathe in that eternal calm are never conscious of the conditions
surrounding them. That's the penalty, I suppose, that humanity pays
for constancy. There are no lapses to record, no deviations to be
accounted for, no tempests to send us tingling into the shelters of
wonder. And I can't yet be quite sure whether this rebellious old
heart of mine wants to be a Pacific Islander or not.

_Monday the Twenty-Seventh_

Peter and I have had our tramp in the snow. It wasn't a sunny day, as
I had hoped. It was one of those intensely cold northern days without
wind or sun, one of those misted days which Balzac somewhere describes
as a beautiful woman born blind. It was fifty-three below zero when we
left the house, with the smoke going up in the gray air as straight
and undisturbed as a pine-tree and the drifts crunching like dry
charcoal under our snow-shoes. We were woolened and mittened and
capped and furred up to the eyes, however, and I was warmer than I've
been many a time on Boston Common in March, even though we did look
like a couple of deep-sea divers and steamed like fire-engines when we
breathed.

We tramped until we were tired, swung back to Casa Grande, and Peter
came in for a cup of tea and then trudged off to Alabama Ranch again.
And that was the lee and the long of it, as the Irish say. What did we
talk about? Heaven knows what we didn't talk about! Peter told me
about a rancher named Bidwell, north of The Crossing, being found
frozen to death in a snow-drift, frozen stiff, with the horse still
standing and the rider still sitting upright in the saddle. He said
there was a lot of rot talked about the great clean outdoors. The
sentimentalists found that they naturally felt a bit niftier in fresh
air, but the great outdoors, according to Peter, is an arena of
endless murder and rapine and