Yesterday, in his bath, he held his hand over
his heart. He held it there for quite a long time, and then he looked
at me with widening eyes. "Mummy," he called out, "I've got a m'sheen
inside me!" And Whinnie's explorations are surely worth emulating. I
too have a machine inside me which some day I'll be compelled to
rediscover. It is a machine which, at present, is merely a pump,
though the ancients, I believe, regarded it as the seat of the
emotions.

_Saturday the Twenty-ninth_

Dinky-Dunk is quite subtle. He is ignoring me, as a modern army of
assault ignores a fortress by simply circling about its forbidding
walls and leaving it in the rear. But I can see that he is deliberately
and patiently making love to my children. He is entrenching himself in
their affection.

He is, of course, their father, and it is not for me to interfere.
Last night, in fact, when Pee-Wee cried for his dad, poor old
Dinky-Dunk's face looked almost radiumized. He has announced that on
Tuesday, when he will have to go in to Buckhorn, he intends to carry
along the three kiddies and have their photograph taken. It reminded
me that I had no picture whatever of the Twins. And that reminded me,
in turn, of what a difference there is between your first child and
the tots who come later. Little Dinkie, being a novelty, was followed
by a phosphorescent wake of diaries and snap-shots and weigh-scales
and growth-records, with his birthdays duly reckoned, not by the year,
but by the month.

It's not that I love the Twins less. It's only that the novelty has
passed. And in one way it's a good thing, for over your second and
third baby you worry less. You know what is needed, and how to do it.
You blaze your trail, as a mother, with your first-born. You build
your road, and after that you are no longer a pioneer. You know the
way you have to go, henceforth, and you follow it. It is less a Great
Adventure, perhaps, but, on the other hand, the double-pointed tooth
of Anxiety does not rowel quite so often at the core of your heart....
I've been wondering if, with the coming of the children, there is not
something which slips away from the relationship between husband and
wife. That there is a difference is not to be denied. There was a time
when I resented this and tried to fight against it. But I wasn't big
enough, I suppose, to block the course of Nature. And it _was_ Nature,
you have to admit when you come to look it h