ed
teepee! And all this toiling and moiling, on the part of my husband,
all this scheming and intriguing and juggling with figures, had been a
campaign for power, a plotting and working to get even with this
haughty old enemy who could carry his defeat so lightly! To be
blackballed like that, I remembered, was to be proclaimed not a
gentleman. And it must have cut deep. At one time, I suppose, Duncan
would have called his monocled captain out. But men seem to fight
differently nowadays. They fight differently, but no less grimly. And
Duncan, whether it is a virtue or a vice in his make-up, would always
be a fighter.... Yet I have no sense of gratitude to Lois Murchison
for depositing her painful truths in my lap. She warned me, in her
artless soprano, that there wasn't much good in sentimentalizing the
situation. But she has thrown a shadow across the house which I was
trying to make into a home. Without quite knowing it, she has
cheapened her life-mate in my eyes. Without quite intending it, she
has left my own husband more ignominious than he once stood. I was
trying hard to school myself into a respect for his material
successes. I was struggling to excuse a great many things by the
engrossing nature of his work. But the motive behind all his efforts
seemed suddenly a sordid one, in many ways a mean one.

I keep remembering what Lois said about not sentimentalizing a
situation. But I'm not yet such a mush of concession that I can't tell
black from white. And there's some part of us, some vague but
unescapable part of us, which we must respect, otherwise we have no
right to walk God's good earth....

I want to get away, for a day or two, to think things out. I think,
before Duncan gets back to-morrow, I shall take Poppsy and run up to
Banff. I may get my view-point back. And the mountain quietness may do
me good....

I keep having that same dull ache of disappointment which came to me
as a girl, after I'd idolized a great man called Meredith and after
I'd almost prayed to a great poet called Browning, on finding that one
was so imperfectly monogamous and that the other philandered and
talked foolishly to women. I had thrust my girlish faith in their
hands, as so often befalls with the young, and they had betrayed
it.... But for the second time since I married, I have been reading
_Modern Love_. And I can almost forgive the Apollo of Box Hill for
that betrayal which he knew nothing about.

_Thursday the Twe