“Marmy,” said Lolly, with dignity, “will you please read me Jules Verne’s story ‘Round the World.’”
Ah me, the mitey part of my Lolly Dinks had flown into the past, where so many little children lie in the amber of a mother’s memory.
He reminds me of the apple blossom and the apple; both are perfect in their way, and in the latter the nub of the blossom, from which the fruit comes, remains. But this does not make me opposed to apple trees; I am not like the man who said he was fond of apples, but he did not approve of the cultivation of the apple tree. I am willing that they should grow as crooked as they like, and lay their dark arms about Tennyson’s fields, and his white kine glimmer as they please.
I also made it one branch of my Dinks amusing business to print some of my talks with Lolly. Mr. Gill made a book for me; not the Mr. Gill whose teeth Wordsworth has given an immortal chatter to, but a Boston Gill. I thought some mothers might find a soothing syrup in the book for their Dinks boys. I know one little girl liked it so much that in reading it she fell out of bed and bumped her head dreadfully. A boy found it in a circulating library, but his mother carried it back the next day. She could see neither rhyme nor reason in it, and the boy cried, because he said he was afraid there was only one Lolly Dinks mother in the world; if there was, he was sure he could be as bad as Lolly Dinks, too.
What to do next about Lolly? Some wise person talks to me about the transition periods; meantime am I to submit to having all my moral corns trod upon, and to watch the growth of his incipient corns? So far he has had everything, from Noah’s ark to a schooner-rigged boat, from a paint box to a set of croquet. He has had all that money can buy; but I have a curious feeling that now he needs something that money cannot buy. I hope this confession will not bring down upon my weak head any dogmatic, cut-and-dried mamma. I am not at home to her. I have gone out: business calls me yonder. Perhaps my own Lolly will tell me what to do next. With all his restlessness and perversity, I see how the sense of beauty develops in his mind, and that somehow he begins to perceive the harmony of goodness; that to be selfish gives him a kind of creepy shame.
“Our Father in heaven,” he said, one day. “Where is the Mother?”
Will he see our life better, more clearly, than Mrs. Dinks, his mother, or Mr. Dinks, his father? We are waiting to learn.
