“What’s the matter?” he asked, for he must have felt my shiver under the robe.
“Nothing,” I said in a thin and pallid voice. “Only I think I’ll go back to the house. And I’m going to make a pot of good hot cocoa!” ... And that’s mostly what life is: making little pots of cocoa to keep our bodies warm in the midst of a never-ending chilliness!
Tuesday the Eighth
My husband is home again. He came back with the first blizzard of the winter and had a hard time getting through to Casa Grande. This gives him all the excuses he could desire for railing at prairie life. I told him, after patiently listening to him cussing about everything in sight, that it was plain to see that he belonged to the land of the beaver. He promptly requested to know what I meant by that.
“Doesn’t the beaver regard it as necessary to dam his home before he considers it fit to live in?” I retorted. But Duncan, in that estranging new mood of his, didn’t relax a line. He even announced, a little later on, that a quick-silver wit might be all right if it could be kept from running over. And it was my turn to ask if he had any particular reference to allusions.
“Well, for one thing,” he told me, “there’s this tiresome habit of hitching nicknames on to everything in sight.”
I asked him what names he objected to. 173
“To begin right at home,” he retorted, “I regard ‘Dinkie’ as an especially silly name for a big hulk of a boy. I think it’s about time that youngster was called by his proper name.”