tacle and pageant, and turn with disgust from the
notion that you, too, could ever throw in your lot with it, fight as a
foot-soldier in its ranks, on equal terms, for life and death!

She despised herself. And yet--and yet! She thought of her mother--her
frail, refined, artistic mother; of a hundred subtleties and charms and
claims, in that world she understood, in which she had been reared; of
all that she must leave behind, were she asked, and did she consent, to
share the life of a Canadian of Anderson's type. What would it be to
fail in such a venture! To dare it, and then to find life sinking in
sands of cowardice and weakness! Very often, and sometimes as though by
design, Anderson had spoken to her of the part to be played by women in
Canada; not in the defensive, optimistic tone of their last walk
together, but forbiddingly, with a kind of rough insistence. Substantial
comfort, a large amount of applied science--that could be got. But the
elegancies and refinements of English rich life in a prairie
farm--impossible! A woman who marries a Canadian farmer, large or small,
must put her own hands to the drudgery of life, to the cooking, sewing,
baking, that keep man--animal man--alive. A certain amount of rude
service money can command in the Northwest; but it is a service which
only the housewife's personal cooeperation can make tolerable. Life
returns, in fact, to the old primitive pattern; and a woman counts on
the prairie according as "she looketh well to the ways of her household
and eateth not the bread of idleness."

Suddenly Elizabeth perceived her own hands lying on her lap. Useless
bejewelled things! When had they ever fed a man or nursed a child?

Under her gauze veil she coloured fiercely. If the housewife, in her
primitive meaning and office, is vital to Canada, still more is the
house-mother. "Bear me sons and daughters; people my wastes!" seems to
be the cry of the land itself. Deep in Elizabeth's being there stirred
instincts and yearnings which life had so far stifled in her. She
shivered as though some voice, passionate and yet austere, spoke to her
from this great spectacle of mountain and water through which she
was passing.

* * * * *

"There he is!" cried Philip, craning his head to look ahead along the
train.

Anderson stood waiting for them on the Field platform. Very soon he was
seated beside her, outside the car, while Philip lounged in the doorway,
an