ord's a middle-aged man now and knows his
limitations. He has realized just how high the supremest high-water
mark of his life will stand. And being human, he must nurse his human
regrets over his failures in life. So now he wishes to see his
thwarted powers come to fuller fruit in his offspring. I'm afraid he'd
even run the risk of sacrificing the boy's happiness for the sake of
knowing Dinkie's wagon was to be hitched to the star of success. For I
know my husband well enough to realize that he has always hankered
after worldly success, that his god, if he had any, has always been
the god of Power. I, too, want to see my son a success. But I want him
to be happy first. I want to see him get some of the things I've been
cheated out of, that I've cheated myself out of. That's the only way
now I can get even with life. I can't live my own days over again. But
I can catch at the trick of living them over again in my Dinkie.

_Thursday the Twenty-Ninth_

We have arrived at an armistice, Dinky-Dunk and I. It was forced on
us, for things couldn't have gone on in the old intolerable manner.
Dinky-Dunk, I fancy, began to realize that he hadn't been quite fair,
and started making oblique but transparent enough efforts at
appeasement. When he sat down close beside me, and I moved away, he
said in a spirit of exaggerated self-accusation: "I'm afraid I've got
a peach-stain on my reputation!" I retorted, at that, that she had
never impressed me as much of a peach. Whereupon he merely laughed, as
though it were a joke out of a Midnight Revue. Then he clipped a
luridly illustrated advertisement of a nerve-medicine out of his
newspaper and pinned it on my bedroom door, after I had ignored his
tentative knock thereon the night before. The picture showed an anemic
and woebegone couple haggling and shaking their fists at each other,
while a large caption announced that "Thousands of Married Folks Lead
a Cat and Dog Life--Are Cross, Crabbed and Grumpy!"--all of which
could be obviated if they used Oxygated Iron.

What made it funny, of course, was the ridiculousness of the drawing.
Then Dinky-Dunk, right before the blushing Gershom, accused me of
being a love-piker. I could sniff which way the wind was blowing, but
I sat tight. Then, to cap the climax, my husband announced that he had
something for me which was surely going to melt my mean old prairie
heart. And late that afternoon he came trundling up to Casa Grande
with nothin