He was my husband, I kept reminding myself. And now he was scrambling that precious collection for a cheap omelette of amorous adventure. He was the husband to whom I’d given up the best part of my life, the two-legged basket into which I’d packed all my eggs of allegiance. He had said what he did with deliberate intent to hurt me, for it was only too obvious that he was tired of being on the defensive. The man I’d wanted to live with like a second “Suzanne de Sirmont” in Daudet’s Happiness had not only cut me to the quick but was rubbing salt in the wound. But this was much more than a matter of barometers. At the end of a long winter, I knew, tempers were apt to be short. A belated March blizzard was slapping at the panes and cuffing the house-corners. I turned to the window, to the end that my Eliza-Crossing-the-Ice look wouldn’t be entirely at his mercy. L.“Well, she doesn’t make love like a frog,” he retorted with his first betraying touch of anger. The women of this town remind me more and more of mice in an oxygen bell they race round and round, drunk with an excitement they can’t quite understand, until they burn up their little lives the same as the mice burn up their little lungs.Īrthur Stringer, The Prairie Child, (A. And I can’t engross myself in their social aspirations, for I’ve seen a bit too much of the world to be greatly taken with the internecine jealousies of a twenty-year-old foot-hill town… Or perhaps it’s merely because I’m an old frump from a back-township ranch!īut I have no intention of trying to keep up with them, for I have a constitutional liking for quietness in my old age. The altitude, I imagine, has quite a little to do with the febrile pace of things here.
They race like mad in the social squirrel-cage, or drug themselves with bridge and golf and the country club, or take to culture with a capital C and read papers culled from the Encyclopedias or spend their husbands’ money on year-old Paris gowns and make love to other women’s mates. They impress me as having no big interests of their own, so they are compelled to playtend with make-believe interests. It’s the women, and the women alone, who seem left out of the procession. When her attention turns to the new social circle she’s been parachuted into, she sees something else at play. McKail is struck by the “stubborn optimism” in the Calgary air. She’s not sure how her speculator husband has turned their dismal economic fortunes around, but he has promised her a comfortable new life in one of Mount Royal’s finest brick mansions, with “cobble-stone walls” and “high-shouldered French cornices,” grounds, gardens and a household staff of three. Duncan Argyll McKail leaves behind her beloved ranch in southern Alberta and moves to Calgary with her two small children in tow. In a last-ditch attempt to save her marriage, the one-time New England socialite, Mrs.
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