l agree with that."

Arabella leaned a little farther over her chair.

"I'll leave you to talk it out with Mr. Ainslie. But there's another
matter. Does Miss Weston recall to you anybody we have met?"

"No," said Ida, with a somewhat incautious decisiveness. "If you mean
our camp-packer, she certainly does not."

Arabella understood this to mean that any comparison of the kind
suggested would be derogatory to the packer, which was somewhat
significant.

"Well," she said, "there is at least a physical resemblance, and
though I haven't probed the matter very deeply, yet I've not abandoned
it."

Then she laughed and turned to Ainslie.

"You and Miss Stirling can thrash out the question."

She strolled away, and Ainslie watched Ida, whose eyes were following
Miss Weston at the tennis net.

"Yes," he remarked, "we play these games rather well; and, after all,
is there any reason why we shouldn't? There are a good many people in
this country who don't consider them as of the first importance."

"Oh," said Ida, "I'm really not looking for faults. Why should you
suspect me of such an unpleasant attitude?"

"Well," observed her companion reflectively, "I can't help thinking
that we now and then give our visitors wrong impressions by showing
them the wrong things. Personally, I should recommend an inspection of
our mines and mills and factories. Besides, one has rather a fancy
that some of our young men, who were brought up, we'll say, to play
tennis well, have shown that they can do rather more than that in
western Canada."

Ida's eyes softened a little as she recalled a weary, gray-faced man
limping back up the hillside one eventful morning; but the turn that
the conversation had taken had its effect on her, and that effect was
to have its result. Like others born in the newer lands, she believed
first of all in practical efficiency, and she had learned during
journeys made with her father that the man with few wants and many
abilities, or indeed the man with only one of the latter strenuously
applied to a useful purpose, is the type in most favor in western
Canada. Graces do not count for much in the west, nor does the
assumption of ability carry a man as far as it sometimes does in older
communities. As Stirling had once said, when they want a chopper in
that country they make him chop, and facility in posing is of very
little service when one is called on to grapple with virgin forest or
stubborn rock.

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