_ 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."
"Then Poppsy," he admitted.
"And who next?" I persisted.
"Whinnie!" exclaimed my son.
But I had to shake my head at that.
"Aren't you forgetting somebody very important?" I hinted.
"Who?" he asked, deepening just a trifle in color.
"How about daddy?" I asked. "Isn't it about time for him there?"
"Yes, daddy," he dutifully repeated. But his face cleared, and my own heart clouded, as he went through the empty rite.
Dinkie was studying that clouded face of mine, by this time, and I began to feel embarrassed. But I was determined to see the thing through. It was hard, though, for me to say what I wanted to.
"Isn't there somebody, somebody else you are especially fond of?" I inquired, as artlessly as I could. And it hurt like cold steel to think that I had to fence with my own boy in such a fashion.
Dinkie looked at me and then he looked out of the window.
"I think I like Susie," he finally admitted.
"But in your own life, Dinkie, in your work and your play, in your school, isn't--isn't there
somebody?" I found the courage to ask.
Dinkie's face grew thoughtful. For just a moment, I thought I caught a touch of the Holbein Astronomer in it.
"There's lots of boys and girls I like," he noncommittally asserted. And I began to see that it was hopeless. My boy had reservations from his own mother, reservations which I would be compelled to respect. He was no longer entirely and unequivocally mine. There was a wild-bird part of him which had escaped, which I could never recapture and cage again. The thing that his father had foretold was really coming about. My laddie would some day grow out of my reach. I would lose him. And my happiness, which had been trying its wings for the last few days, came down out of the sky like a shot duck. All day long, for Susie's sake, I've tried to be light-hearted. But my efforts make me think of a poor old worn-out movie-hall piano doing its pathetic level best to be magnificently blithe. It's a meaningless clatter in a meaningless world. _