fifty years of life aggregated three billion, one hundred and
fifty-five million, seven hundred and sixty thousand, Susie sighed and
said it was no wonder women were so contradictory. Which impressed me
as very like one of my own retorts to Gershom. I saw Susie studying
him, studying him with a quiet and meditative eye. "I believe your
Gershom is one of the few good men in the world," she afterward
acknowledged to me. And I've been wondering why one so young should be
saturated with cynicism.

A small incident occurred to-night which disturbed me more than I can
explain to myself. Susie, who had been looking through one of Dinkie's
school scribblers, guardedly passed the book over to me where I sat
sewing in front of the fire. For, whatever may happen, a prairie
mother can always find plenty of sewing to do. I looked at the bottom
of the page which Susie pointed out to me. There I saw two names, one
above the other, with certain of the letters stricken out, two names
written like this:

[E][l]m[e][r] McKai[l]----love
Do[r][e][e]n O'[L]on[e]----friendship

[Transcriber's note: In original, letters in brackets are struck out,
each with a diagonal slash.]

And that set me off in a brown study which even Susie seemed to
fathom. She smiled understandingly and turned and inspected Dinkie,
bent over his arithmetic, with an entirely new curiosity.

"I suppose that's what every mother has to face, some day," she said
as she sat down beside me in front of the fire.

But it seemed a fire without warmth. Life, apparently, had brought me
to another of its Great Divides. My boy had a secret apart from his
mother. My son was no longer all mine.

_Friday the Fifth_

This morning at breakfast, when Dinkie and I were alone at the table,
I crossed over to him and sat down beside him.

"Dinkie," I said, with my hand on his tousled young head, "whom do you
love best in all the world?"

"Mummy!" he said, looking me straight in the eye. And at that I drank
in a deep breath.

"Are you sure?" I demanded.

"As sure as death and taxes," he said with his one-sided little smile.
It was a phrase which his father used to use, on similar occasions, in
the long, long ago. And it didn't quite drive the mists out of my
heart.

"And who comes next?" I asked, with my hand still on his head.

"Buntie," he replied, with what I suspected to be a barricaded look on
his face.

"No, no," I told him. "It has to be a human being."