The second one, however, was a more ambitious effort. He worked over it, propped up in bed, for an hour or two. Then, having looked upon his work and having seen that it was good, he blushingly passed it over to me. So I went to the window and read it.
I read it over slowly, with a crazy fluttering of the heart which I could never explain. They were so trivial, those little halting lines, and yet so momentous to me! It was life seeking expression, life groping so mysteriously toward music. It was man emerging out of the dusk of time. It was Rodin’s Penseur, not in grim and stately bronze, but in a soft-eyed and white-bodied child, groping his stumbling way toward the border-land of consciousness, staring out on a new world and finding it wonderful. It was my Little Stumbler, my Precious Piece-of-Life, walking with his arm first linked through the arm of Mystery. It was my Dinkie looking over the rampart of the home-nest and breaking lark-like into song.
I went back to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, and took my man-child in my arms.
“It’s wonderful, Dinkie,” I said, trying to hide the tears I was so ashamed of. “It’s so wonderful, my boy, that I’m going to keep it with me, always, as 162 long as I live. And some day, when you are a great man, and all the world is at your feet, I’m going to bring it to you and show it to you. For I know now that you are going to be a great man, and that your old mother is going to live to be so proud of you it’ll make her heart ache with joy!”
He hugged me close, in a little back-wash of rapture, and then settled down on his pillows.
“I could do better ones than that,” he finally said, with a glowing eye.
“Yes,” I agreed. “They’ll be better and better. And that’ll make your old Mummsy prouder and prouder!”
He lay silent for several minutes. Then he looked at the square of paper which I held folded in my hand.
“I’d like to send it to Uncle Peter,” he rather startled me by saying.