Canada -- Fiction; Frontier and pioneer life -- Prairie Provinces -- Fiction
But whatever happened, Count Theobald Gustav Von Guntner threw me down,
and Dinky-Dunk caught me on the bounce, and now instead of going to
embassy balls and talking world-politics like a Mrs. Humphry Ward
heroine I've married a shack-owner who grows wheat up in the Canadian
Northwest. And instead of wearing a tiara in the Grand Tier at the
Metropolitan I'm up here a dot on the prairie and wearing an apron made
of butcher's linen! _Sursum corda!_ For I'm still in the ring. And it's
no easy thing to fall in love and land on your feet. But I've gone and
done it. I've taken the high jump. I've made my bed, as Uncle Carlton
had the nerve to tell me, and now I've got to lie in it. But _assez
d'Etrangers_!
That wedding-day of mine I'll always remember as a day of smells, the
smell of the pew-cushions in the empty church, the smell of the
lilies-of-the-valley, that dear, sweet, scatter-brained
Fanny-Rain-In-The-Face (she rushed to town an hour after getting my
wire) insisted on carrying, the smell of the leather in the damp taxi,
the tobaccoy smell of Dinky-Dunk's quite impossible best man, who'd been
picked up at the hotel, on the fly, to act as a witness, and the smell
of Dinky-Dunk's brand new gloves as he lifted my chin and kissed me in
that slow, tender, tragic, end-of-the-world way big and bashful men
sometimes have with women. It's all a jumble of smells.
Then Dinky-Dunk got the wire saying he might lose his chance on the
Stuart Ranch, if he didn't close before the Calgary interests got hold
of it. And Dinky-Dunk wanted that ranch. So we talked it over and in
five minutes had given up the idea of going down to Aiken and were
telephoning for the stateroom on the Montreal Express. I had just four
hours for shopping, scurrying about after cook-books and golf-boots and
table-linen and a chafing dish, and a lot of other absurd things I
thought we'd need on the ranch. And then off we flew for the West,
before poor, extravagant, ecstatic Dinky-Dunk's thirty-six wedding
orchids' from Thorley's had faded and before I'd a chance to show Fanny
my nighties!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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