Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/153

 my occasional expeditions, I see her but seldom and then usually so beset with husband, friends, and personages that there is little opportunity for the long educational tête-à-têtes of the summer. Of these conversations, be it admitted once for all, the secret excitement is in listening for the occasional lilt of Cornelia's lyric youth amid the finished certainty and assurance of her later manner. Her own mature authoritativeness I can deal with in a fashion and even relish; but in the winter, in the daily proximity of her husband, she has an intolerable habit of throwing out flying buttresses, of quoting Oliver—"Oliver says," and so forth—as if she were referring a country lawyer to a decision of the Supreme Court. It is a little painful.

Still, in the winter holidays I like to call on the two of them in their own characteristic setting, for a variety of reasons which will be obvious enough to all those provincials who spend the gray season quietly sitting in silent, snowbound prairie towns and villages, dreaming, like waifs in a Scandinavian fairy tale, of the bright commotion of crowded streets and thronged foyers and Duse and Pavlowa and grand opera and Conrad and Lloyd George and Swinnerton and windows full of