Yet, strangely enough, it was at that moment expressing itself in regret and compunction.  Since the dawn, that morning, she had been unable to sleep.  The strong light, the pricking air, had kept her wakeful; and she had been employing her time in writing to her mother, who was also her friend.

“...  Dear little mother—­You will say I have been unkind—­I say it to myself.  But would it really have been fairer if I had forbidden him to join us?  There was just a chance—­it seems ridiculous now—­but there was—­I confess it!  And by my letter from Toronto—­though really my little note might have been written to anybody—­I as good as said so to him, ‘Come and throw the dice and—­let us see what falls out!’ Practically, that is what it amounted to—­I admit it in sackcloth and ashes.  Well!—­we have thrown the dice—­and it won’t do!  No, it won’t, it won’t do!  And it is somehow all my fault—­which is abominable.  But I see now, what I never saw at home or in Italy, that he is a thousand years older than I—­that I should weary and jar upon him at every turn, were I to marry him.  Also I have discovered—­out here—­I believe, darling, you have known it all along!—­that there is at the very root of me a kind of savage—­a creature that hates fish-knives and finger-glasses and dressing for dinner—­the things I have done all my life, and Arthur Delaine will go on doing all his.  Also that I never want to see a museum again—­at least, not for a long time; and that I don’t care twopence whether Herculaneum is excavated or not!

“Isn’t it shocking?  I can’t explain myself; and poor Mr. Arthur evidently can’t make head or tail of me, and thinks me a little mad.  So I am, in a sense.  I am suffering from a new kind of folie des grandeurs.  The world has suddenly grown so big; everything in the human story—­all its simple fundamental things at least—­is writ so large here.  Hope and ambition—­love and courage—­the man wrestling with the earth—­the woman who bears and brings up children—­it is as though I had never felt, never seen them before.  They rise out of the dust and mist of our modern life—­great shapes warm from the breast of Nature—­and I hold my breath.  Behind them, for landscape, all the dumb age-long past of these plains and mountains; and in front, the future on the loom, and the young radiant nation, shuttle in hand, moving to and fro at her unfolding task!

“How unfair to Mr. Arthur that this queer intoxication of mine should have altered him so in my foolish eyes—­as though one had scrubbed all the golden varnish from an old picture, and left it crude and charmless.  It is not his fault—­is mine.  In Europe we loved the same things; his pleasure kindled mine.  But here he enjoys nothing that I enjoy; he is longing for a tiresome day to end, when my heart is just singing for delight.  For it is not only Canada in the large that holds me, but all its dear, human, dusty, incoherent detail—­all its clatter of new