the subject. It's just another case, I suppose, where
fiction is too cowardly or too finicky to be truthful. I had theories
about this child-business myself, at one time, but my pipe of illusion
has plumb gone out. It wasn't so many years ago that I imagined about
all a mother had to do was to dress in clinging _negligees_, such as
you see in the toilet-soap advertisements, and hold a spotless little
saint on her knee, or have a miraculously docile nurse in cap and
apron carry in a little paragon all done up in dotted Swiss and
rose-pink, and pose for family groups, not unlike popular prints of
the royal family in full evening dress, on _Louis Quinze_ settees. And
later on, of course, one could ride out with a row of sedate little
princelings at one's side, so that one could murmur, when the world
marveled at their manners, "It's blood, my dears, merely blood!"

But fled, and fled forever, are all such dreams. Dinkie prefers
treading on his bread-and-butter before consuming it, and does his
best to consume the workings of my sewing-machine, and pokes the
spoons down through the crack in the kitchen floor, and betrays a
weakness for yard-mud and dust in preference to the well-scrubbed
boards of the sleeping porch, which I've tried to turn into a sort of
nursery by day. Most fiction, I find, glides lightly over this eternal
Waterloo between dirt and water--for no active and healthy child is
easy to keep clean. That is something which you never, never, really
succeed at. All that you can do is to keep up the struggle, consoling
yourself with the memory that cleanness, even surgical cleanness, is
only an approximation. The plain everyday sort of cleanness promptly
resolves itself into a sort of neck and neck race with dirt and
disorder, a neck and neck race with the soap-bar habitually running
second. Sometimes it seems hopeless. For it's incredible what can
happen to an active-bodied boy of two or three years in one brief but
crowded afternoon. It's equally amazing what can happen to a
respectably furnished room after a healthy and high-spirited young
Turk has been turned loose in it for an hour or two.

It's a battle, all right. But it has its compensations. It _has_ to,
or the race would wither up like an unwatered cucumber-vine. Who
doesn't really love to tub a plump and dimpled little body like my
Dinkie's? I'm no petticoated Paul Peel, but I can see enough beauty in
the curves of that velvety body to lift it up and b