And thus we dragged through a long, long period which has nothing to do with my account of our particular affairs--the period of the war, in point of fact. I feel it is not incumbent upon me to make a record of the war though it occurred at this time, inasmuch as several quite competent persons, including Mr. Wilson and the Associated Press, have covered the matter pretty carefully and quite as accurately as I should, the more especially as I spent the entire span of the war in California, and the Golden State was curiously removed from any sense of actual warfare. Not that I mean to say that we Californians were in any way lacking in patriotism or that we failed to do our part, for goodness knows we just about fed the entire nation, and prices didn't go up, either, the way they did in the East. You could still buy at pre-war prices in 1918, and we were so rich as a community that we could do without the scandalous increases of which we read in our week-late New York Sunday newspapers. But what I mean is that somehow war seemed to belong to the East rather than to us. And I think we worried more over Mexico than over Flanders, and who can blame us when we were so near to Mexico that we could actually see what went on there? Or the result of what went on, at least? And the European war was just like some horrid rather unconvincing nightmare which the East had got itself into and that we had in consequence to help her out of. Peaches and I ran the home ranch, and hardly left it, after Richard's enlistment. When I reflect upon our life there it seems punctuated by two great events and nothing else, though at the time of living through it I seemed to be in a continuous crisis, my upbringing crashing against my environment. The first momentous occurrence to which I have referred was news of the duke. It came in a letter from Abby, who mentioned him casually in passing. The Chinese cook had brought the mail up from Oroville and Peaches and I had carried it outside to the edge of the swimming pool which Mr. Pegg had built into an angle of the ranch house, a gaunt white-painted frame building, very like a big New England farm-house, as are many of the homesteads of northern California. It was a heavenly mild late September day, with the barren hills turning faintly green already, though the rains had been tardy and scarce, and the roses in the garden had still to be irrigated regularly. The roads, hub deep with dust in summer, were bad now, honeycombed with mud holes, and the mail was late.