at was happening right under her
nose, she had, long before she had the chance to say so openly by word
of mouth, but now that the fat was in the fire she wasn't the kind to
sit by and see those she should be loyal to led about by the nose. And
so forth. And so forth! For just what else the irate Struthers had to
unload from her turbulent breast I never did know, since at that
opportune moment Dinkie awakened and proceeded to page his parent with
all the strength of his impatient young lungs.

By the time I'd attended to Dinkie and finished my sadly neglected
marmalade--for humans must eat, whatever happens--I'd made an effort to
get some sort of order back into my shattered world. Yet it was about
Duncan more than any one else that my thoughts kept clustering and
centering. He seemed, at the moment, oddly beyond either pity or blame.
I thought of him as a victim of his own weakness, as the prey of a
predaceous and unscrupulous woman who had intrigued and would continue
to intrigue against his happiness, a woman away from her own world, a
self-complacent and sensual privateer who for a passing whim, for a
momentary appeasement of her exile, stood ready to sacrifice the last
of his self-respect. She was self-complacent, but she was also a woman
with an unmistakable physical appeal. She was undeniably attractive, as
far as appearances went, and added to that attractiveness was a
dangerous immediacy of attack, a touch of outlawry, which only too
often wins before resistance can be organized. And Dinky-Dunk, I kept
reminding myself, was at that dangerous mid-channel period of a man's
life where youth and age commingle, where the monotonous middle-years
slip their shackles over his shoulders and remind him that his days of
dalliance are ebbing away. He awakens to the fact that romance is being
left behind, that the amorous adventure which once meant so much to him
must soon belong to the past, that he must settle down to his jog-trot
of family life. It's the age, I suppose, when any spirited man is
tempted to kick up with a good-by convulsion or two of romantic
adventure, as blind as it is brief and passionate, sadly like the
contortions of a rooster with its head cut off.

I tried, as I sat down and struggled to think things out, to withhold
all blame and bitterness. Then I tried to think of life without
Dinky-Dunk. I attempted to picture my daily existence with somebody
else in the place that my Diddums had once filled. B