ght of kings. But I can see that he is
often wrong, and even my Dinkie can see that he is not always right in
his decrees. More and more often, of late, I've observed the boy
studying his father, studying him with an impersonal and critical eye.
And this habit of silent appraisal is plainly something which Duncan
resents, and resents keenly. He's beginning to have a feeling, I'm
afraid, that he can't quite get _at_ the boy. And there's a youthful
shyness growing up in Dinkie which seems to leave him ashamed of any
display of emotion before his father. I can see that it even begins to
exasperate Duncan a little, to be shut out behind those incontestable
walls of reserve. It's merely, I'm sure, that the child is so terribly
afraid of ridicule. He already nurses a hankering to be regarded as
one of the grown-ups and imagines there's something rather babyish in
any undue show of feeling. Yet he is hungry for affection. And he
aches, I know, for the approbation of his male parent, for the
approval of a full-grown man whom he can regard as one of his own
kind. He even imitates his father in the way in which he stands in
front of the fire, with his heels well apart. And he gives me chills
up the spine by pulling short on one bridle-rein and making Buntie,
his mustang-pony, pirouette just as the wicked-tempered Briquette
sometimes pirouettes when his father is in the saddle. Yet
Dinky-Dunk's nerves are a bit ragged and there are times when he's not
always just with the boy, though it's not for me to confute what the
instinctive genius of childhood has already made reasonably clear to
Dinkie's discerning young eye. But I can not, of course, encourage
insubordination. All I can do is to ignore the unwelcome and try to
crowd it aside with happier things. I want my boy to love me, as I
love him. And I think he does. I _know_ he does. That knowledge is an
azure and bottomless lake into which I can toss my blackest pebbles of
fear, my flintiest doubts of the future.

_Sunday the Fourth_

I wish I could get by the scruff of the neck that sophomoric old
philosopher who once said nothing survives being thought of. For I've
been learning, this last two or three days, just how wide of the mark
he shot. And it's all arisen out of Dinky-Dunk's bland intimation that
I am "a withered beauty." Those words have held like a fish-hook in
the gills of my memory. If they'd come from somebody else they
mightn't have meant so much. But from