The Prairie Child. Stringer Arthur

as I sat studying his face, and I felt sorriest for him because he felt sorry for himself.

      “That’s exactly the point,” he averred. “There doesn’t seem anything to do. But this can’t go on forever.”

      “No,” I acknowledged. “It seems too much like history repeating itself.”

      His head went down, at that, and it was quite a long time before he looked up at me again.

      “I don’t suppose you can see it from my side of the fence?” he asked with a disturbing new note of humility in his voice.

      “Not when you force me to stay on the fence,” I told him. He seemed to realize, as he sat there slowly moving his head up and down, that no further advance was to be made along that line. So he took a deep breath and sat up.

      “Something will have to be done about getting a new teacher for that school,” he said with an appositeness which was only too painfully apparent.

      “I’ve already spoken to two of the trustees,” I told 22 him. “They’re getting a teacher from the Peg. It’s to be a man this time.”

      Instead of meeting my eye, he merely remarked: “That’ll be better for the boy!”

      “In what way?” I inquired.

      “Because I don’t think too much petticoat is good for any boy,” responded my lord and master.

      “Big or little!” I couldn’t help amending, in spite of all my good intentions.

      Dinky-Dunk ignored the thrust, though it plainly took an effort.

      “There are times when even kindness can be a sort of cruelty,” he patiently and somewhat platitudinously pursued.

      “Then I wish somebody would ill-treat me along that line,” I interjected. And this time he smiled, though it was only for a moment.

      “Supposing we stick to the children,” he suggested.

      “Of course,” I agreed. “And since you’ve brought the matter up I can’t help telling you that I always felt that my love for my children is the one redeeming thing in my life.”

      “Thanks,” said my husband, with a wince.

      “Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m merely trying 23 to say that a mother’s love for her children has to be one of the strongest and holiest things in this hard old world of ours. And it seems only natural to me that a woman should consider her children first, and plan for them, and make sacrifices for them, and fight for them if she has to.”

      “It’s so natural, in fact,” remarked Dinky-Dunk, “that it has been observed in even the Bengal tigress.”

      “It is my turn to thank you,” I acknowledged, after giving his statement a moment or two of thought.

      “But we’re getting away from the point again,” proclaimed my husband. “I’ve been trying to tell you that children are like rabbits: It’s only fit and proper they should be cared for, but they can’t thrive, and they can’t even live, if they’re handled too much.”

      “I haven’t observed any alarming absence of health in my children,” I found the courage to say. But a tightness gathered about my heart, for I could sniff what was coming.

      “They may be all right, as far as that goes,” persisted their lordly parent. “But what I say is, too much cuddling and mollycoddling isn’t good for that boy of yours, or anybody else’s boy.” And he proceeded to explain that my Dinkie was an ordinary, 24 every-day, normal child and should be accepted and treated as such or we’d have a temperamental little bounder on our hands.

      I knew that my boy wasn’t abnormal. But I knew, on the other hand, that he was an exceptionally impressionable and sensitive child. And I couldn’t be sorry for that, for if there’s anything I abhor in this world it’s torpor. And whatever he may have been, nothing could shake me in my firm conviction that a child’s own mother is the best person to watch over his growth and shape his character.

      “But what is all this leading up to?” I asked, steeling myself for the unwelcome.

      “Simply to what I’ve already told you on several occasions,” was my husband’s answer. “That it’s about time this boy of ours was bundled off to a boarding-school.”

      I sat back, trying to picture my home and my life without Dinkie. But it was unbearable. It was unthinkable.

      “I shall never agree to that,” I quietly retorted.

      “Why?” asked my husband, with a note of triumph which I resented.

      “For one thing, because he is still a child, because he is too young,” I contended, knowing that I could 25 never agree with Dinky-Dunk in his thoroughly English ideas of education even while I remembered how he had once said that the greatness of England depended on her public-schools, such as Harrow and Eton and Rugby and Winchester, and that she had been the best colonizer in the world because her boys had been taken young and taught not to overvalue home ties, had been made manlier by getting off with their own kind instead of remaining hitched to an apron-string.

      “And you prefer keeping him stuck out here on the prairie?” demanded Dinky-Dunk.

      “The prairie has been good enough for his parents, this last seven or eight years,” I contended.

      “It hasn’t been good enough for me,” my husband cried out with quite unlooked-for passion. “And I’ve about had my fill of it!”

      “Where would you prefer going?” I asked, trying to speak as quietly as I could.

      “That’s something I’m going to find out as soon as the chance comes,” he retorted with a slow and embittered emphasis which didn’t add any to my peace of mind.

      “Then why cross our bridges,” I suggested, “until we come to them?” 26

      “But you’re not looking for bridges,” he challenged. “You don’t want to see anything beyond living like Doukhobours out here on the edge of Nowhere and remembering that you’ve got your precious offspring here under your wing and wondering how many bushels of Number-One-Hard it will take to buy your Dinkie a riding pinto!”

      “Aren’t you rather tired to-night?” I asked with all the patience I could command.

      “Yes, and I’m talking about the thing that makes me tired. For you know as well as I do that you’ve made that boy of yours a sort of anesthetic. You put him on like a nose-cap, and forget the world. He’s about all you remember to think about. Why, when you look at the clock, nowadays, it isn’t ten minutes to twelve. It’s always Dinkie minutes to Dink. When you read a book you’re only reading about what your Dinkie might have done or what your Dinkie is some day to write. When you picture the Prime Minister it’s merely your Dinkie grown big, laying down the law to a House of Parliament made up of other Dinkies, rows and rows of ’em. When the sun shines you’re wondering whether it’s warm enough for your Dinkie to walk in, and when the snow begins to melt you’re wondering whether 27 it’s soft enough for the beloved Dinkie to mold into snowballs. When you see a girl you at once get busy speculating over whether or not she’ll ever be beautiful enough for your Dinkie, and when one of the Crowned Heads of Europe announces the alliance of its youngest princess you fall to pondering if Dinkie wouldn’t have made her a better husband. And when the flowers come out in your window-box you wonder if they’re fair enough to bloom beside your Dinkie. I don’t suppose I ever made a haystack that you didn’t wonder whether it wasn’t going to be a grand place for Dinkie to slide down. And when Dinkie draws a goggle-eyed man on his scribbler you see Michael Angelo totter and Titian turn in his grave. And when Dinkie writes a composition of thirty crooked lines on the landing of Hengist you feel that fate did Hume a mean trick in letting him pass away before inspecting that final word in historical record. And heaven’s just a row of Dinkies with little gold harps tucked under