The Long Portage by Harold Bindloss

Lisle was living luxuriously in Victoria when Nasmyth's answer reached him by mail. Though it was still winter among the ranges of the North, the seaboard city had been bathed in clear sunshine and swept by mild west winds during the past few days, and after the bitter frost and driving snow Lisle rejoiced in the genial warmth and brightness. There are few more finely situated cities than Victoria, with its views across the strait of the white heights of Mount Baker and the Olympians on the American shore, even in the Pacific Province where the environment of all is beautiful.

Lisle was sitting in the hotel lounge after dinner when three English letters were handed to him. The sight of them affected him curiously, and leaning back in his chair he glanced round the room. Like the rest of the great building in which he had his quarters, it was sumptuously furnished, but everything was aggressively new. There was, he felt, little that suggested fixity of tenure and continuity in the West; the times changed too rapidly, people came and went, alert, feverishly bustling, optimistic. In the old land, his friends among the favored few dwelt with marked English calm in homes that had apparently been built to stand forever. Yet he was Western, by deliberate choice as well as by birth; while there was much to be said for the other life which had its seductive charm, the strenuous, eager one that he led was better.