d her to write a little note to Gershom Binks, advising him of
his ex-pupil's advance. For Lossie is a girl I'd like Gershom to know.
And she has done this for me. I ask her over to the house as often as
I can and yesterday I had Dinkie slip a little platinum-banded
fountain-pen, with a card, into the pocket of her rather threadbare
ulster. Duncan, however, is not in the least interested in Lossie. He
despises what he calls insignificant people.

On my way home from shopping I had Hilton drive me about some of the
less-known parts of the city. And I have been compelled to recast some
of my earlier impressions of Calgary. It is wonderful, in many ways,
and some day, I can see, it will be beautiful, just as Lossie Brown
will some day be beautiful.

In the first place, it is so happily situated, lying as it does
half-way between the mountains and the plain. And the blue Bow comes
dancing so joyously down from the Rockies and the older city sleeps so
happily in the sunny crook of its valley-arm, while the newer suburbs
seem to boil up and run over the surrounding hills like champagne
bubbling over the rim of a glass. There are raw edges, of course, but
time will eventually attend to these. Now and then, between the
motor-cars, you will see a creaking Red River cart. Next to an
office-building of gray sandstone you're likely to spot what looks
like a squatter's wickyup of rusty galvanized iron. Yesterday, on our
main street where the electric-cars were clanging and the limousines
were throwing their exhaust incense to the gods of the future, I
caught sight of a lonely and motionless figure, isolated in the midst
of a newer world. It was the figure of a Cree squaw, blanketed and
many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and
the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized,
as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that
stolid old lady in the blanket.

I'm even beginning to find that one can get tired of optimism,
especially when it is being so plainly converted from a psychic
abstraction into a municipal asset. There's a sort of communal
Christian Science in this place which ordains that thought shall not
dwell on such transient evils as drought or black rust or early frost
or hail-storms or money stringencies. And there's a sort of youthful
greediness in people's longing to live all there is of life to live
and to know all there is of life to know. For there i