“Lady Alicia had better rope in her ranch when the roping is good,” I retorted, chilled a little by her repeated intrusion into the situation. For I had no intention of speaking of Lady Alicia Newland with bated breath, just because she had a title. I’d scratched dances with a duke or two myself, in my time, even though I could already see myself once more wielding a kitchen-mop and tamping a pail against a hog-trough, over at the Harris Ranch.
“You’re missing the point,” began Dinky-Dunk.
“Listen!” I suddenly commanded. A harried roebuck has nothing on a young mother for acuteness of hearing. And thin and faint, from above-stairs, I caught the sound of a treble wailing which was promptly augmented into a duet.
“Poppsy’s got Pee-Wee awake,” I announced as I rose from my chair. It seemed something suddenly remote and small, this losing of a fortune, before the more imminent problem of getting a pair of crying babies safely to sleep. I realized that as I ran upstairs and started the swing-box penduluming back and forth. I even found myself much calmer in spirit by the time I’d crooned and soothed the Twins off again. And I was smiling a little, I think, as I went down to my poor old Dinky-Dunk, for he held out a hand and barred my way as I rounded the table to resume my seat opposite him.
“You don’t despise me, do you?” he demanded, holding me by the sleeve and studying me with a slightly mystified eye. It was an eye as wistful as an old hound’s in winter, an eye with a hunger I’d not seen there this many a day.
“Despise you, Acushla?” I echoed, with a catch in my throat, as my arms closed about him. And as he clung to me, with a forlorn sort of desperation, a soul-Chinook seemed to sweep up the cold fogs that had gathered and swung between us for so many months. I’d worried, in secret, about that fog. I’d tried to tell myself that it was the coming of the children that had made the difference, since a big strong man, naturally, had to take second place to those helpless little mites. But my Dinky-Dunk had a place in my heart which no snoozerette could fill and no infant could usurp. He was my man, my mate, my partner in this tangled adventure called life, and so long as I had him they could take the house with the laundry-chute and the last acre of land.
“My dear, my dear,” I tried to tell him, “I was never hungry for money. The one thing I’ve always been hungry for is love. What’d be the good of having a millionaire husband if he looked like a man in a hair-shirt on every occasion when you asked for a moment of his time? And what’s the good of life if you can’t crowd a little affection into it? I was just thinking we’re all terribly like children in a Maypole dance. We’re so impatient to get our colored bands wound neatly about a wooden stick, a wooden stick that can never be ours, that we make a mad race of what really ought to be a careless and leisurely joy. We don’t remember to enjoy the dancing, and we seem to get so mixed in our ends. So carpe diem, say I. And perhaps you remember that sentence from Epictetus you once wrote out on a slip of paper and pinned to my bedroom door: ‘Better it is that great souls should live in small habitations than that abject slaves should burrow in great houses!’”
Dinky-Dunk, as I sat brushing back his top-knot, regarded me with a sad and slightly acidulated smile.
“You’d need all that philosophy, and a good deal more, before you’d lived for a month in a place like the Harris shack,” he warned me.
“Not if I knew you loved me, O Kaikobad,” I very promptly informed him.