might possess his
full degree of Dinkiness and the glory that was Greece must have been
merely the tom-toms tuning up for the finished dance of our Dinkie's
grandeur. Day and night, it's Dinkie, just Dinkie!"

I waited until he was through. I waited, heavy of heart, until his
foolish fires of revolt had burned themselves out. And it didn't seem
to add to his satisfaction to find that I could inspect him with a
quiet and slightly commiserative eye.

"You are accusing me," I finally told him, "of something I'm proud of.
And I'm afraid I'll always be guilty of caring for my own son."

He turned on me with a sort of heavy triumph.

"Well, it's something that you'll jolly well pay the piper for, some
day," he announced.

"What do you mean by that?" I demanded.

"I mean that nothing much is ever gained by letting the maternal
instinct run over. And that's exactly what you're doing. You're trying
to tie Dinkie to your side, when you can no more tie him up than you
can tie up a sunbeam. You could keep him close enough to you, of
course, when he was small. But he's bound to grow away from you as he
gets bigger, just as I grew away from my mother and you once grew away
from yours. It's a natural law, and there's no use crocking your knees
on it. The boy's got his own life to live, and you can't live it for
him. It won't be long, now, before you begin to notice those quiet
withdrawals, those slippings-back into his own shell of self-interest.
And unless you realize what it means, it's going to hurt. And unless
you reckon on that in the way you order your life you're not only
going to be a very lonely old lady but you're going to bump into a big
hole where you thought the going was smoothest!"

I sat thinking this over, with a ton of lead where my heart should
have been.

"I've already bumped into a big hole where I thought the going was
smoothest," I finally observed.

My husband looked at me and then looked away again.

"I was hoping we could fill that up and forget it," he ventured in a
valorously timid tone which made it hard, for reasons I couldn't quite
fathom, to keep my throat from tightening. But I sat there, shaking my
head from side to side.

"I've got to love something," I found myself protesting. "And the
children seem all that is left."

"How about me?" asked my husband, with his acidulated and slightly
one-sided smile.

"You've changed, Dinky-Dunk," was all I could say.

"But some day," he contend