egitimate and mature "cream of wheat." And now
that she has a better mastery of the sibilants the charm has rather
gone out of the claim, which I so laboriously taught her, that "Daddy
is all feet," meaning, of course, that he was altogether sweet--which
he gave small sign of being when he first caught the point of my
patient schooling. She is not so quick-tongued as her brother Dinkie,
but she has a natural fastidiousness which makes her long for
alignment with the proprieties. She is, in fact, a conformist, a
sedate and dignified little lady who will never be greatly given to
the spilling of beans and the upsetting of apple-carts. She is, in
many ways, amazingly like her pater. She will, I know, be a nice girl
when she grows up, without very much of that irresponsibility which
seems to have been the bugbear of her maternal parent. I'm even
beginning to believe there's something in the old tradition about
ancestral traits so often skipping a generation. At any rate, that
crazy-hearted old Irish grandmother of mine passed on to me a muckle
o' her wildness, the mad County Clare girl who swore at the vicar and
rode to hounds and could take a seven-barred gate without turning a
hair and was apt to be always in love or in debt or in hot water. She
died too young to be tamed, I'm told, for say what you will, life
tames us all in the end. Even Lady Hamilton took to wearing
red-flannel petticoats before she died, and Buffalo Bill faded down
into plain Mr. William Cody, and the abducted Helen of Troy gave many
a day up to her needlework, we are told, and doubtlessly had trouble
with both her teeth and her waist measurement.

Dinky-Dunk is proud of his Poppsy and has announced that it's about
time we tucked the "Poppsy" away with her baby-clothes and resorted to
the use of the proper and official "Pauline Augusta." So Pauline we
shall try to have it, after this. There are several things, I think,
which draw Dinky-Dunk and his Poppsy--I mean his Pauline--together.
One is her likeness to himself. Another is her tractability, though I
hate to hitch so big a word on to so small a lady. And still another
is the fact that she is a girl. There's a subliminal play of
sex-attraction about it, I suppose, just as there probably is between
Dinkie and me. And there's something very admirable in Pauline
Augusta's staid adoration of her dad. She plays up to him, I can see,
without quite knowing she's doing it. She's hungry for his approval,
a