re of them in this hard old world of ours!

Speaking of gentlemen, there's a Captain Goodhue here whom I rather
like. Lois Murchison brought us together in the tea-room of the
Palliser. In more ways than one he reminds me of Peter. But Captain
Goodhue is a much older man, and is English, coming from a very
excellent family in Sussex. He's one of those iron-gray ex-Army men
who still believe in a monocle and can be loyal to a queen even though
she wears a basque with darts in it. And he doesn't talk to a woman
with that ragging air of condescension which seems to be peculiar to
western American civilization. He is courteous and thoughtful and
sincere, though I noticed that he winced a trifle when I suddenly
remembered, as he was taking his departure, that the McKails were
living in what must have once been his house. He blinked, like a
well-groomed old eagle, when I reminded him of this. I never dreamed,
of course, that the subject would be painful to him. But it was an
honor, he acknowledged with a bow, to pass his household gods on to a
lady to whom so much had already been given.

When I asked Lois about it, later on, she rather indifferently
acknowledged that the old gentleman had been making a mess of his
different business ventures. He was much better at golf than getting
in on the ground-floor of a land deal. He was too old fogy, said
Slinkie, to make good in the West. He still kept his head up, but
they'd pretty well picked him to the bones.... Lois, by the way,
describes me as something new in her menagerie and drops in to see me
at the most unexpected moments. Then her tongue goes like a
mower-knife. She is persuaded that I should permanent-wave my hair,
lower my waist-line, and go in for amethysts. "And interest yourself,
my dear, in an outside man or two," she has sagely advised me. "For
husbands, you'll find, always accept you at the other mutt's
valuation!"

I was tempted to make her open her jade-green eyes, for a moment, by
telling her I was already interested in an outside man or two and that
my lord and master hadn't been much influenced by the extraneous
appreciations. But I'm a little afraid of Slinkie and her serpent's
tongue. And I'm a little afraid of this new circle into which my
Duncan has so laboriously engineered himself. They more and more
impress on my simple old prairie soul that the single-track woman is
the woman who gets most out of life, that there's nothing really
great and nothing