ing isn't
good for that boy of yours, or anybody else's boy." And he proceeded
to explain that my Dinkie was an ordinary, every-day, normal child
and should be accepted and treated as such or we'd have a
temperamental little bounder on our hands.

I knew that my boy wasn't abnormal. But I knew, on the other hand,
that he was an exceptionally impressionable and sensitive child. And I
couldn't be sorry for that, for if there's anything I abhor in this
world it's torpor. And whatever he may have been, nothing could shake
me in my firm conviction that a child's own mother is the best person
to watch over his growth and shape his character.

"But what is all this leading up to?" I asked, steeling myself for the
unwelcome.

"Simply to what I've already told you on several occasions," was my
husband's answer. "That it's about time this boy of ours was bundled
off to a boarding-school."

I sat back, trying to picture my home and my life without Dinkie. But
it was unbearable. It was unthinkable.

"I shall never agree to that," I quietly retorted.

"Why?" asked my husband, with a note of triumph which I resented.

"For one thing, because he is still a child, because he is too young,"
I contended, knowing that I could never agree with Dinky-Dunk in his
thoroughly English ideas of education even while I remembered how he
had once said that the greatness of England depended on her
public-schools, such as Harrow and Eton and Rugby and Winchester, and
that she had been the best colonizer in the world because her boys had
been taken young and taught not to overvalue home ties, had been made
manlier by getting off with their own kind instead of remaining
hitched to an apron-string.

"And you prefer keeping him stuck out here on the prairie?" demanded
Dinky-Dunk.

"The prairie has been good enough for his parents, this last seven or
eight years," I contended.

"It hasn't been good enough for me," my husband cried out with quite
unlooked-for passion. "And I've about had my fill of it!"

"Where would you prefer going?" I asked, trying to speak as quietly as
I could.

"That's something I'm going to find out as soon as the chance comes,"
he retorted with a slow and embittered emphasis which didn't add any
to my peace of mind.

"Then why cross our bridges," I suggested, "until we come to them?"

"But you're not looking for bridges," he challenged. "You don't want
to see anything beyond living like Doukhobours out here on th