a dour Scotch look ate an enormous meal in solemn silence, and then they went off and played tennis!  Their wedding took place three days ago!!  The third had been there a fortnight, and seemed very jaded and bored, while the last were mere children, and only married yesterday!  She was too sweet, and got crimson when she poured out his tea, and asked him if he took sugar?  I suppose up till now they had only been allowed nursery bread and milk.

I don’t believe I should like to have had my honeymoon breakfasts in public, would you, Mamma?  Because I remember Harry always wanted—­but I really must not let myself think of him or all my pride will vanish, and I shall not be able to resist cabling.

I find the senator too attractive.  He does not speak much generally, and never boasts of anything he has done.  We have to drag stories out of him, but he must have had such a life, and I am sure there is some tragedy in his past connected with his wife.  He has such a whimsical sense of humour, and yet underneath there is a ring of melancholy sometimes.  I know he and I are going to be the greatest friends.  Gaston is getting seriously in love, which is perfectly ridiculous; he almost threatened to throw himself into the falls when we went to look at them; but fortunately I said only the very curly-haired could look well when picked up drowned, so that put him off.

I was not half so impressed with the falls as I ought to have been.  They don’t seem so high as in the pictures, and the terrible buildings on one side distract one so it seems as if even the water can’t be natural, and must be just arranged by machinery.  But it was fun going under them, and those oilskin coats and caps are most becoming.  You go down in a lift and then walk along passages scooped out of the rock until you are underneath the volume of water, which pours over in front of you like a curtain.  It was here Gaston suggested his suicide, and all because I had told the senator that he was to arrange for us to have a drive alone in the afternoon, and he overheard in the echo the place makes.  I had never asked him to drive alone he said, and I said, certainly not, the senator and I would talk philosophy, whereas he would make love to me, I knew, and it would not be safe.  That pacified him a good deal, and as I had been rather unsympathetic and horrid all the morning, I was lovely to him for the rest of the day; and he is really quite a dear, Mamma, as I have always told you.

Octavia says she thinks it rather hard my grabbing everybody like this, and she had wanted the senator for herself on our trip, so we have agreed to share him, and Tom says it is mean no one has been asked for him.  So the senator has wired to “Lola” to bring two cousins to meet us at Los Angeles.  He says they are the sweetest girls in the world, and would keep anyone alive.  I am rather longing to get there and begin our fun.  After the falls we did the rapids, and they impressed me far more deeply; they are rushing, wicked-looking things if you like, Mamma, and how anyone ever swam them I can’t imagine.  The spring is all too beautiful, only just beginning, and some of the bends of the river and views are exquisite.  I felt quite romantic on the way back, and allowed Gaston to repeat poetry to me.  We are just starting to get on to Chicago, so good-bye, dear Mamma.