of the lamps and a three-year-old _Pall-Mall Magazine_ and shut himself
up in the bunk-house.

Then I was sorry.

I tiptoed over to the door, and found it was locked. Then I went and
got my mouth-organ and sat meekly down on the doorstep and began to
play the _Don't Be Cross_ waltz. I dragged it out plaintively, with a
_vox humana tremolo_ on the coaxing little refrain. Finally I heard a
smothered snort, and the door suddenly opened and Dinky-Dunk picked me
up, mouth-organ and all. He shook me and said I was a little devil, and
I called him a big British brute. But he was laughing and a wee bit
ashamed of his temper and was very nice to me all the rest of the
evening.

I'm getting, I find, to depend a great deal on Dinky-Dunk, and it makes
me afraid, sometimes, for the future. He seems able to slip a hand
under my heart and lift it up, exactly as though it were the chin of a
wayward child. Yet I resent his power, and keep elbowing for more
breathing-space, like a rush-hour passenger in the subway crowd.
Sometimes, too, I resent the over-solemn streak in his mental make-up.
He abominates ragtime, and I have rather a weakness for it. So once or
twice in his dour days I've found an almost Satanic delight in singing
_The Humming Coon_. And the knowledge that he'd like to forbid me
singing rag seems to give a zest to it. So I go about flashing my saber
of independence:

"Ol' Ephr'm Johnson was a deacon of de church in Tennessee,
An' of course it was ag'inst de rules t' sing ragtime melodee!"

But I am the one, I notice, who always makes up first. To-night as I was
making cocoa before we went to bed I tried to tell my Diddums there was
something positively doglike in my devotion to him. He nickered like a
pony and said he was the dog in this deal. Then he pulled me over on
his knee and said that men get short-tempered when they were tuckered
out with worry and hard work, and that probably it would be hard for
even two of the seraphim always to get along together in a two-by-four
shack, where you couldn't even have, a deadline for the sake of
dignity. It was mostly his fault, he knew, but he was going to try to
fight against it. And I experienced the unreasonable joy of an
unreasonable woman who has succeeded in putting the man she loves with
all her heart and soul in the wrong. So I could afford to be humble
myself, and make a foolish lot of fuss over him. But I shall always
fight for my elbow-room. For there are ti