ad made the difference, since a big
strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless
little mites. But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no
snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my
mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as
I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the
last acre of land.

"My dear, my dear," I tried to tell him, "I was never hungry for
money. The one thing I've always been hungry for is love. What'd be
the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a
hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time?
And what's the good of life if you can't crowd a little affection into
it? I was just thinking we're all terribly like children in a Maypole
dance. We're so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about
a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a
mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We
don't remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in
our ends. So _carpe diem_, say I. And perhaps you remember that
sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and
pinned to my bedroom door: 'Better it is that great souls should live
in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great
houses!'"

Dinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a
sad and slightly acidulated smile.

"You'd need all that philosophy, and a good deal more, before you'd
lived for a month in a place like the Harris shack," he warned me.

"Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad," I very promptly informed
him.

"But you do know that," he contended, man-like. I was glad to find,
though, that a little of the bitterness had gone out of his eyes.

"Feather-headed women like me, Diddums, hunger to hear that sort of
thing, hunger to hear it all the time. On that theme they want their
husbands to be like those little Japanese wind-harps that don't even
know how to be silent."

"Then why did you say, about a month ago, that marriage was like
Hogan's Alley, the deeper one got into it the tougher it was?"

"Why did you go off to Edmonton for three whole days without kissing
me good-by?" I countered. I tried to speak lightly, but it took an
effort. For my husband's neglect, on that occasion, had seemed the
first intimation that the glory was over and done with. It had given
me about