turning away to push in a hair-pin so that he wouldn't see
the tremble that I could feel in my lower lip. For an unreasonable and
illogical and absurdly big wave of compassion for my poor old
Dinky-Dunk was welling up through my tired body, threatening to leave
me and all my make-believe dignity as wobbly as a street-procession
Queen of Sheba on her circus-float. I was hearing, I knew, the words
that I'd waited for, this many a month. I was at last facing the scene
I'd again and again dramatized on the narrow stage of my woman's
imagination. But instead of bringing me release, it brought me
heart-ache; instead of spelling victory, it came involved with the
thin humiliations of compromise. For things could never be the same
again. The blot was there on the scutcheon, and could never be argued
away. The man I loved had let the grit get into the bearings of his
soul, had let that grit grind away life's delicate surfaces without
even knowing the wine of abandoned speed. He had been nothing better
than the passive agent, the fretful and neutral factor, the cheated
one without even the glory of conquest or the tang of triumph. But he
had been saved for me. He was there within arm's reach of me,
battered, but with the wine-glow of utter contrition on his face.

"Take me back, _Babushka_," I could hear his shaken voice imploring.
"I don't deserve it--but I can't go on without you. I can't! I've had
enough of hell. And I need you more than anything else in this world!"

That, I had intended telling him, wasn't playing quite fair. But when
he reached out his hands toward me, exactly as I've seen his own Dinky
do at nightfall when a darkening room left his little spirit hungry
for companionship, something melted like an overlooked chocolate
_mousse_ in my crazy old maternal heart, and before I was altogether
aware of it I'd let my hands slip over his shoulders as he knelt with
his bowed head in my lap. The sight of his colorless and unhappy face
with that indescribable homeless-dog look in his eyes was too much for
me. I gave up. I hugged his head to my breast-bone as though it were
my only life-buoy in an empty and endless Atlantic and only stopped
when I had to rub the end of my nose, which I couldn't keep a
collection of several big tears from tickling.

"I'm a fool, Dinky-Dunk, a most awful fool," I tried to tell him, when
he gave me a chance to breathe again. "And I've got a temper like a
bob-cat!"

"No, no, Beloved," he