s, who come into the
world alone, and go out of it alone, are always hungering for
companionship which we can't quite find. Our souls are islands, with a
coral-reef of reserve built up about them. Last night, when I was
patching some of Gershom's undies for him, I wickedly worked an
arrow-pierced heart, in red yarn, on one leg of his B.V.D.'s. This
morning, I noticed, his eye evaded mine and there was marked
constraint in his manner. I even begin to detect unmistakable signs of
nervousness in him when we happen to be alone together. And during his
last music lesson there was a _vibrata_ of emotion in his voice which
made me think of an April frog in a slough-end.

Even my little Dinkie, day before yesterday, asked me if I'd mind not
bathing him any more. He explained that he thought he could manage
very nicely by himself now. It seemed trivial enough, and yet, in a
way, it was momentous. I am to be denied the luxury of tubbing my own
child. I, who always loved even the smell of that earthy and
soil-grubbing young body, who could love it when it wasn't any too
clean and could glory in its musky and animal-like odors as well as
the satin-shine of the light on its well-soaped little ribs, must now
stand aside before the reservations of sex. It makes me feel that I've
reached still another divide on the continent of motherhood.

This afternoon, when I wandered into the study, I observed Dinkie
stooping over a Chesterfield pillow with his right hand upraised in a
perplexingly dramatic manner. He turned scarlet when he saw me
standing there watching him. But the question in my eyes did not
escape him.

"I was pr'tendin' to be King Arthur when he found out Guinevere was in
love with Launcelot," he rather lamely explained as he walked away to
the window and stood staring out over the prairie. But for the life of
me I can't understand what should have turned his thoughts into that
particular channel of romance. Those are matters with which the young
and the innocent should have nothing to do. They are matters, in fact,
which it behooves even the old and the wary to eschew.

_Sunday the Sixteenth_

It seems strange, in such golden summer weather, that every man and
woman and child on this sunbathed footstool of God shouldn't be sanely
and supremely happy.... My husband, I am glad to say, is once more
back in his home. And I have been realizing, the last few days, that
home is an empty and foolish place without its m