et-up.

"I should rather like to ride that way," she coolly announced.

"It's the only way," I told her, making Paddy pirouette by pressing a
heel against his short-ribs. She meant, of course, riding astride,
which must have struck her as the final word in audacity.

"I like your pony," next remarked Lady Alicia, with a somewhat wistful
intonation in her voice.

"He's a brick," I acknowledged. Then I swung about to help Francois
head off a bunch of rampaging steers. "Come and see us," I called back
over my shoulder. If Lady Alicia answered, I didn't have time to catch
what she said.

But that romp on Paddy has done me good. It shook the solemnity out of
me. I've just decided that I'm not going to surrender to this
middle-aged Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire stuff before my time. I'm going to
refuse to grow old and poky. I'm going to keep the spark alive, the
sacred spark of youth, even though folks write me down as the biggest
loon west of the Dirt Hills. So dear Lord--this is my prayer--whatever
You do to me, keep me _alive_. O God, don't let me, in Thy divine mercy,
be a Dead One. Don't let me be a soured woman with a self-murdered soul.
Keep the wine of youth in my body and the hope of happiness in my heart.
Yea, permit me deeply to live and love and laugh, so that youth may
abide in my bones, even as it did in that once-renowned Duchess of
Lienster,

Who lived to the age of a hundred and ten,
To die of a fall from a cherry-tree then!

My poor old Dinky-Dunk, by the way, meanders about these days so moody
and morose it's beginning to disturb me. He's at the end of his
string, and picked clean to the bone, and I'm beginning to see that
it's my duty to buoy that man up, to nurse him back into a respectable
belief in himself. His nerves are a bit raw, and he's not always
responsible for his manners. The other night he came in tired, and
tried to read, when Poppsy and Pee-Wee were both going it like the
Russian Balalaika. To tell the truth, their little tummies were a bit
upset, because the food purveyor had had too strenuous a day to be
regular in her rounds.

"Can't you keep those squalling brats quiet?" Dinky-Dunk called out to
me. It came like a thunder clap. It left me gasping, to think that he
could call his own flesh and blood "squalling brats." And I was
shocked and hurt, but I decided not to show it.

"Will somebody kindly page Lord Chesterfield?" I quietly remarked as I
went to the T