long....

I've just been up to make sure the children were properly covered in
bed. And it disturbed me a little to find that without even thinking
about it I went to Dinkie first. It seemed like accidental
corroboration of all that Duncan has been saying. But I stood studying
him as he lay there asleep. It frightened me a little, to find him so
big. If it's true, as Duncan threatens, that time will tend to turn
him away from me, it's something that I'm going to fight tooth and
nail. And I've seen no sign of it, as yet. With every month and every
year that's added to his age he grows more companionable, more able to
bridge the chasm between two human souls. We have more interests in
common, more things to talk about. And day by day Dinkie is reaching
up to my clumsily mature way of looking at life. He can come to me
with his problems, knowing I'll always give him a hearing, just as he
used to come to me with his baby cuts and bruises, knowing they would
be duly kissed and cared for. Yet some day, I have just remembered,
he may have problems that can't be brought to me. But that day, please
God, I shall defer as long as possible. Already we have our own little
secrets and private compacts and understandings. I don't want my boy
to be a mollycoddle. But I want him to have his chance in the world. I
want him to be somebody. I can't reconcile myself to the thought of
him growing up to wear moose-mittens and shoe-packs and stretching
barb-wire in blue-jeans and riding a tractor across a prairie
back-township. I refuse to picture him getting bent and gray wringing
a livelihood out of an over-cropped ranch fourteen miles away from a
post-office and a world away from the things that make life most worth
living. If he were an ordinary boy, I might be led to think
differently. But my Dinkie is not an ordinary boy. There's a spark of
the unusual, of the exceptional, in that laddie. And I intend to fan
that spark, whatever the cost may be, until it breaks out into
genius.

_Sunday the Twenty-Eighth_

I've had scant time for introspection during the last five days, for
Struthers has been in bed with lumbago, and the weight of the
housework reverted to me. But Whinstane Sandy brought his precious
bottle of Universal Ointment in from the bunk-house, and while that
fiery mixture warmed her lame back, the thought of its origin probably
warmed her lonely heart. I have suddenly wakened up to the fact that
Struthers is getting