all
normal, quite normal, under the circumstances. So, after all, I'm just
an ordinary, everyday woman! But the man of medicine has ordered me to
stay in bed for twelve days--which Olga regards as unspeakably
preposterous, since one day, she proudly announced, was all her mother
ever asked for. Which shows the disadvantages of being too civilized!

_Sunday the Ninth_

I'm day by day getting stronger, though I'm a lady of luxury and lie in
bed until ten every morning. To-day when I was sitting up to eat
breakfast, with my hair braided in two tails and a pink and white
hug-me-tight over my nightie, Dinky-Dunk came in and sat by the bed. He
tried to soft-soap me by saying he'd be mighty glad when I was running
things again so he could get something fit to eat. Olga, he admitted,
was all right, but she hadn't the touch of his Gee-Gee. He confessed
that for nearly a month now the house had been a damned gynocracy and he
was getting tired of being bossed around by a couple of women. _Mio
piccino_ no longer looks like a littered whelp of the animal world, as
he did at first. His wrinkled little face and his close-shut eyes used
to make me think of a little old man, with all the wisdom of the ages
shut up in his tiny body. And it is such a knowing little body, with
all its stored-up instincts and guardian appetites! My little _tenor
robusto_, how he can sing when he's hungry! Last night I sat up in bed,
listening for my son's--Dinky-Dink's--breathing. At first I thought he
might be dead, he was so quiet. Then I heard his lips move in the
rhapsodic deglutition of babyland dreams. "Dinky-Dunk," I demanded,
"what would we do if Babe should die?" And I shook him to make him
answer. He stared up at me with a sleepy eye. "That whale?" he commented
as he blinked contentedly down at his offspring and then turned over and
went to sleep. But I slipped a hand in under little Dinky-Dink's body,
and found it as warm as a nesting bird.

_Monday the Tenth_

I noticed that Dinky-Dunk had not been smoking lately, so I asked him
what had become of the rest of his cigars. He admitted that he had given
them to Olie. "When?" I asked. And Dinky-Dunk colored up as he answered,
rather casually, "Oh, the day Buddy Boy was born!" How men merge down
into the conventional in their more epochal moments!

The second day after my baby's birth Olga rather took my breath away by
carrying in as neat a little wooden cradle as any prince of t