e he had any
idea of the peck of trouble he was going to stir up at Casa Grande.
For Dinky-Dunk picked up the sheet of paper on which that
light-hearted message had been written and perused the two lines,
perused them with a savagery which rather disturbed me. He read them
for the second time, and then he put them down. His eye, as he
confronted me, was a glacial one.

"It's too bad we can't run this show without the interference of
outsiders," he announced as he stalked out of the room.

I've been thinking the thing over, and trying to get my husband's
view-point. But I can't quite succeed. There has always been a touch
of the satyric in Dinky-Dunk's attitude toward Peter's weekly letter
to my boy. He has even intimated that they were written in a new kind
of Morse, the inference being that they were intended to carry
messages in cipher to eyes other than Dinkie's. But Peter is much too
honest a man for any such resort to subterfuge. And Dinky-Dunk has
always viewed with a hostile eye the magazines and books and toys
which big-hearted Peter has showered out on us. Peter always was
ridiculously open-handed. And he always loved my Dinkie. And it's only
natural that our thoughts should turn back to where our love has been
left. Peter, I know, gets quite as much fun out of those elaborately
playful letters to Dinkie as Dinkie does himself. And it's left the
boy more anxious to learn, to the end that he may pen a more
respectable reply to them.

Some of Peter's gifts, it is true, have been embarrassingly ornate,
but Peter, who has been given so much, must have remembered how little
has come to my kiddies. It was my intention, for a while, to talk this
over with Dinky-Dunk, to try to make him see it in a more reasonable
light. But I have now given up that intention. There's a phantasmal
something that holds me back....

I dreamt last night that my little Dinkie was a grown youth in a Greek
academy, wearing a toga and sitting on a marble bench overlooking a
sea of lovely sapphire. There both Peter and Percy, also arrayed in
togas, held solemn discourse with my offspring and finally agreed that
once they were through with him he would be the Wonder of the Age....

Dinky-Dunk asked me point-blank to-day if I'd consider the sale of
Casa Grande, provided he got the right price for the ranch. I felt,
for a moment, as though the bottom had been knocked out of my world.
But it showed me the direction in which my husband's thou