the silo of my soul.

"Yes, I know," he quietly affirmed, as he hung his head. "She told me
about it. And it was _awful_. It should never have happened. It made
me ashamed even--even to face you!"

"That was natural," I agreed, with my heart still steeled against him.

"It makes a fool of a man," he protested, "a situation like that."

"Then the right sort of man wouldn't encourage it," I reminded him,
"wouldn't even permit it." And still again I caught that quick
movement of impatience from him.

"What's that sort of thing to a man of my age?" he demanded. "When you
get to where I am you don't find love looming so large on the horizon.
What--"

"No, it clearly doesn't loom so large," I interrupted.

"What you want then," went on Dinky-Dunk, ignoring me, "is power,
success, the consolation of knowing you're not a failure in life.
_That's_ the big issue, and that's the stake men play big for, and
play hard for."

It was, I remembered in my bitterness of soul, what I myself had been
playing hard for--but I had lost. And it had left my heart dry. It had
left my heart so dry that my own Dinky-Dunk, standing there before me
in the open sunlight, seemed millions of miles removed from me,
mysteriously depersonalized, as remote in spirit as a stranger from
Mars come to converse about an inter-stellar telephone-system.

"Then you've really achieved your ambition," I reminded my husband, as
he stood studying a face which I tried to keep tranquil under his
inspection.

"Oh, no," he corrected, "only a small part of it."

"What's the rest?" I indifferently inquired, wondering why most of
life's victories, after all, were mere Pyrrhic victories.

"You," declared Dinky-Dunk, with a reckless light in his eyes, "You,
and the children, now that I'm in a position to give them what they
want."

"But _are_ you?" I queried.

"Well, that's what I'm coming back to demonstrate," he found the
courage to assert.

"To them?" I asked.

"To all of you!" he said with a valiant air of finality.

I told him it was useless, but he retorted that he didn't propose to
have that stop him. I explained to him that it would be embarrassing,
but he parried that claim by protesting that sacrifice was good for
the soul. I asserted that it would be a good deal of a theatricality,
under the circumstances, but he attempted to brush this aside by
stating that what he had endured for years might be repeated by
patience.

So Dinky-Dunk is comi