For a week in Juneau they attended the sessions of the Alaska Legislature daily, all day. They pendulumed from the sessions of the Alaska Senate on this side of the Federal Building to the sessions of the Representatives on that. Men and women. They talked, they pleaded, they presented, they argued, they quarreled, like all free legislative bodies, but their voices went unheard Outside. The women members particularly fascinated Christine. They wore well-cut suits and smart hats, and when they arose to speak they sounded clear, composed and terribly in earnest.

“It must be kind of fun, being a member of the Legislature, Grampa Thor. Maybe when I’m their age.” To Chris they seemed quite ancient—forty, fifty, even sixty. “Somebody said they’re trying to get Bridie to run for Representative from our district. She’d be wonderful, wouldn’t she! She’d tell ’em.”

“Yes,” Thor said, rather sadly. “But sometimes, in politics today, especially in Alaska politics, not telling ’em is more effective. Just doing.… Look at these names, Christine, on the list. They make a kind of cross section of Alaska history … Gunderson … Kasilov … Petrovich … Krause … O’Shaughnessy … McCutcheon … Taylor … Ellis … Utukok … D’Orsay … Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, Ireland, France, England, Canada.”

“That’s not so different, is it? That’s like every other place in the United States, isn’t it?”

“My darling girl!” She couldn’t imagine why he seemed so happy about what she had said.

The planes alone were a liberal education, their paths in the air were the roadways of Alaska, they bore such cargo and such human freight as could scarcely be encompassed by the believing eye. Young Eskimo women in modish slacks and pale blue toppers, their feet in loafers and neat white socks. They always carried a baby in their arms, and the baby was resplendent in pale blue or pale pink satin coverlet, a pink nylon and lace dress, lace-trimmed panties, bootees of soft pink kid. Dark slanting eyes in a startlingly pink-and-white face might regard gravely a gray-haired grandmother whose spare New England figure sat so erect beside the daughter-in-law and the grandchild that she now was seeing and visiting in a daze of unbelief. The wife and child of her son Donald, the lieutenant in the United States Army stationed in Alaska. The wife and child of her son Arthur, born in Akron, Ohio, Engineering Cornell ’51. The wife and child of her son John, why didn’t he stay home and build houses in Bridgeport, Connecticut, even if the pay wasn’t so high, and marry that nice Betty Walworth that was so crazy about him. She settled her hat more firmly on her neat gray head, the severe little American Midwest or New England elderly hat. Her daughter-in-law was hatless, her hair done in a modish coiffure.

At lunch time, “What is your formula?” the plane stewardess would ask.

The young Eskimo mother with the plump baby on her lap would say, “One half canned milk, one half water.”