protested, "it's not foolishness--it's
nobility!"

I couldn't answer him, for his arms had closed about me again. "And I
love you, Tabbie, I love you with every inch of my body!"

Women are weak. And there is no such thing, so far as I know, as an
altogether and utterly perfect man. So we must winnow strength out of
our weakness, make the best of a bad bargain, and over-scroll the
walls of our life-cell with the illusions which may come to mean as
much as the stone and iron that imprison us. All we can do, we who are
older and wiser, is wistfully to overlook the wobble where the meshed
perfection of youth has been bruised and abused and loosened, tighten
up the bearings, and keep as blithely as we can to the worn old road.
For life, after all, is a turn-pike of concession deep-bedded with
compromise. And our To-morrows are only our To-days over again.... So
Dinky-Dunk, who keeps saying in unexpected and intriguing ways that he
can't live without me, is trying to make love to me as he did in the
old days before he got salt-and-peppery above the ears. And I'm
blockhead enough to believe him. I'm like an old shoe, I suppose,
comfortable but not showy. Yet it's the children we really have to
think of. Our crazy old patch-work of the Past may be our own, but the
Future belongs to them. There's a heap of good, though, in my
humble-eyed old Dinky-Dunk, too much good ever to lose him, whatever
may have happened in the days that are over.

_Sunday the Twenty-fourth_

Dinky-Dunk, whom I actually heard singing as he took his bath this
morning, is exercising his paternal prerogative of training little
Dinkie to go to bed without a light. He has peremptorily taken the
matter out of my hands, and is, of course, prodigiously solemn about
it all.

"I'll show that young Turk who's boss around this house!" he
magisterially proclaims almost every night when the youthful wails of
protest start to come from the Blue Room in the East Wing.

And off he goes, with his Holbein's Astronomer mouth set firm and the
fiercest of frowns on his face.

It had a tendency to terrify me, at first. But now I know what a
colossal old fraud and humbug this same soft-hearted and granite-crusted
specimen of humanity can be. For last night, after the usual
demonstration, I slipped out to the Blue Room and found big Dunkie
kneeling down beside little Dinkie's bed, with Dinkie's small hand
softly enclosed in his dad's big p