“This sounds quite disturbing,” I interrupted. “It almost leaves me suspicious that you are about to emulate the rabbit and devour your young.”
Dinky-Dunk fixed me with an accusatory finger.
“And the fact that you can get humor out of it 20 shows me just how far it has gone,” he cried with a bitterness which quickly enough made me sober again. “And I could stand being deliberately shut out of your life, and shut out of their lives as far as you can manage it, but I can’t see that it’s doing either them or you any particular good.”
“But I am responsible for the way in which those children grow up,” I said, quite innocent of the double entendre which brought a dark flush to my husband’s none too happy face.
“And I suppose I’m not to contaminate them?” he demanded.
“Haven’t you done enough along that line?” I asked.
He swung about, at that, with something dangerously like hate on his face.
“Whose children are they?” he challenged.
“You are their father,” I quietly acknowledged. It rather startled me to find Dinky-Dunk regarding himself as a fur coat and my offspring as moth-eggs which I had laid deep in the pelt of his life, where we were slowly but surely eating the glory out of that garment and leaving it as bald as a prairie dog’s belly.