would not have tied up.

Phyllis says that she has gotten out of the habit of decent food, that every time she really dines, she gets strange pains in her underneath. I wish I could fly back home, but I must grit my teeth and get rid of my beast too. I wonder which breed I'll try next time. Boston Bull, I suppose, I think that's where Carlton was first kenneled.

I have a large stove in my sitting-room and keep it going myself. Othello looks as though he'd laugh himself to death every time I put coal on—darn his pelt! He's crazy over Sioux Falls—possibly because there are seven dogs to the city block. He goes away on bridal tours every few days and then I have to get out a search warrant. I could live quite decently if I did not have to invest in so many rewards for him.

It is so terribly cold here that my very thoughts are frozen and my hot-water bag does nightly service. The thing sprung a leak last week and I took it to a garage to ask if they would mend it, and the fellow answered: "Certainly, madam, we have quite a trade in hot-water bottles and "nature's rivals."" I have also found out that the only place to buy burnt wood is at Mr. Trepaning's the undertaker and embalmer.

All the stiff and crackling branches of the trees are weighted down with a three-inch ruching of snow. It is all silently fascinating, especially so because since starting this letter two short raps at my window announce Carlton who comes each night to accompany me to the late post after the landlady is snoozing. His arms are around me as I scrawl, and the thousand tiny little thrills that answer so eagerly to his nearness, assure me that it is not deplorable to be thirty-nine.

Good night,
MARIANNE.

December 20.

So near Xmas, dear, yet none of the Yule-tide joys float out to this frozen wilderness. Snow, snow everywhere. The tall alders, whose vivid coloring so inspired me when I arrived, are now black and gaunt, and the pitiless desert wind comes tearing and howling from the north to bend and crack their stiffened joints. I often wonder—am I any more the arbiter of my fate than these lifeless snow-draped spectres around me.

Carlton left the hotel almost a week ago and took the room next to mine. We are hopelessly in love with each other, and he wonders how he ever could have thought of accepting happiness from Mrs. Claymore, accompanied by so many freckles and a half million dollars.

As for Bern, dear, he will survive. I am much older than he is, so that some day he would be forty with all his emotions and I would be fifty with the rheumatism—it would never do. Henceforth I shall be prodigal of negatives, except where Carlton is concerned.

We have attained the intimacy which thinks aloud, and instead of hating Sioux Falls and longing for my sentence to expire, I am beginning to worship every inch of the ground, and only pray that such an exile should last forever.

None of the fulminating fires that I have heretofore known are mine—only calm and peace and the joys born of a perfect understanding. We have not let the moment slip when souls meet in comprehension. I almost decided not to confide all this to you, but it slipped off my pen and I'm not sorry, for no woman living was ever before blessed with a friend like you. You and I have visited the lowest Dantesque circles of despair together, and no confidence between us could amount to an indiscretion.

Our landlady thinks that we are merely speaking acquaintances, and it is best, as this new-found sympathy must not be distilled by Sioux Falls scandal-mongers, though I should like to shout it from the house tops through a megaphone, I am so happy and proud of it.

So you shot with Aldrich and he tried to get you to buy "Steel Preferred." I am glad you did not invest and sorry you did not win the cup. I shall never again shoot for pleasure. I am ashamed of my trophies. Perhaps love has made me mushy but I don't regret it as hate made me flinty. Have you noticed how our bonds have slumped—the whole thing was a Golden Fleece. Commercialism bores me to extinction. I suppose the world began with trade, since Adam sold Paradise for a pippin.

Are you still of the opinion that tradespeople should be branded on the forehead down to the third generation?—you dear snobbish treasure.

Henceforth I shall only deal in sentimental tramways and have shares in the moral funds—maybe not moral according to the threadbare ideal of the genus homo sapiens.

Surprising that a girl as young as Alice Noah—no relation to the fellow who built the ark—should just take out legal separation papers in New York. How can the modus vivendi suit her better than divorce? Perhaps she wants to cinch her alimony until she finds another affinity. Then Alice for Dakota. It is foolish to cut your financial string when you might just as well dangle, especially until you find something worth dropping for.

Dear, will you please send me a reel of Sirdars? I can't smoke anything else and no one sells them out here. Our landlady has one eye that looks up the chimney and another that goes cellar wards and Carlton says that she always regards him obliquely—never mind, she is a good stupid soul and I can forgive a landlady anything but perspicacity. I don't see how our intimacy has escaped her,—to me it looks like the first foreign sticker on an American five dollar dress suit case.

Why do you write such short letters? Is it because you have but a limited number of ideas and must dispense them carefully?

What did Philip Leighton die of? His wife, I suppose. They never had anything in common but the kiddies. That means no more hunts at Blackburn Heath unless someone careless like Philip absorbs the estate. Mrs. Philip was a Pennsylvania girl. N'est ce pas? That accounts for her effulgent spontaneity. Isn't it a shame for me to wax bombastic over a girl who, if she were just a little brighter, might be called half witted. She's the girl with the massive mother, who suffers from dislocated adjectives. They say when she was married her prayer book was missing, so she carried a cake of ivory soap instead—The mother was divorced and could have had alimony if she had wanted it, but she had better sense than to want it. She has venomous optics—the fellows used to say they flew when she flashed her calciums; ugly as the seven deadly sins and so mannish that I was always afraid her trousers would show beneath her petticoats. The giddy old cat! If she had been hanging since her sixtieth birthday, she would certainly be breathless now.

All day, dear, I go about my duties with a most ladylike absence of passion, but when night comes I cross the sandy waste of the past and stretch out my hands to fondle the idea of perfect companionship. Our thoughts seem to be a reverberation of the same thunderous roll, and while they are not identical, they are of the same breadth and elevation. The conditions of propinquity are responsible; and as love did not come to me, I had to do as Mahomet did with the mountain.

When he goes from me, Joy vanishes, but leaves a bright track of light behind, which bursts upon me through the clouds of cigarette smoke that he has left.

Each day I awaken more warmed and thrilled, like the sun