self, I am rigidly suspending all judgments. I'm at least
trying to play my part, even though my spirit isn't in it. There are
times when I'm tempted to feel that a foot-hill city of this size is
neither fish nor fowl. It impresses me as a frontier cow-town grown
out of its knickers and still ungainly in its first long trousers. But
I can't help being struck by people's incorruptible pride in their own
community. It's a sort of religious faith, a fixed belief in the
future, a stubborn optimism that is surely something more than
self-interest. It's the Dutch courage that makes deprivation and long
waiting endurable.

It's the women, and the women alone, who seem left out of the
procession. They impress me as having no big interests of their own,
so they are compelled to _playtend_ with make-believe interests. They
race like mad in the social squirrel-cage, or drug themselves with
bridge and golf and the country club, or take to culture with a
capital C and read papers culled from the Encyclopedias; or spend
their husbands' money on year-old Paris gowns and make love to other
women's mates. The altitude, I imagine, has quite a little to do with
the febrile pace of things here. Or perhaps it's merely because I'm an
old frump from a back-township ranch!

But I have no intention of trying to keep up with them, for I have a
constitutional liking for quietness in my old age. And I can't engross
myself in their social aspirations, for I've seen a bit too much of
the world to be greatly taken with the internecine jealousies of a
twenty-year-old foot-hill town. My "day" in this aristocratic section
is Thursday, and Tokudo this afternoon admitted callers from seven
closed cars, two landaulets, three Detroit electrics and one hired
taxi. I know, because I counted 'em. The children and I posed like a
Raeburn group and did our best to be respectable, for Duncan's sake.
But he seems to have taken up with some queer people here, people who
drop in at any time of the evening and smoke and drink and solemnly
discuss how a shandygaff should be mixed and tell stories I wouldn't
care to have the children hear.

There's one couple Duncan asked me to be especially nice to, a Mr. and
Mrs. Murchison. The latter, I find, is usually addressed as "Slinkie"
by her friends, and the former is known as "Cattalo Charley" because
he once formed a joint-stock company which was to make a fortune
interbreeding buffalo and range-cattle, the product of th