What! treat a great nation in the birth as though it were there for her mere pleasure and entertainment?
Make of it a mere spectacle 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.