I'm day by day getting stronger, though I'm a lady of luxury and lie in bed until ten every morning. To-day when I was sitting up to eat breakfast, with my hair braided in two tails and a pink and white hug-me-tight over my nightie, Dinky-Dunk came in and sat by the bed. He tried to soft-soap me by saying he'd be mighty glad when I was running things again so he could get something fit to eat. Olga, he admitted, was all right, but she hadn't the touch of his Gee-Gee. He confessed that for nearly a month now the house had been a damned gynocracy and he was getting tired of being bossed around by a couple of women. Mio piccino no longer looks like a littered whelp of the animal world, as he did at first. His wrinkled little face and his close-shut eyes used to make me think of a little old man, with all the wisdom of the ages shut up in his tiny body. And it is such a knowing little body, with all its stored-up instincts and guardian appetites! My little tenor robusto, how he can sing when he's hungry! Last night I sat up in bed, listening for my son's--Dinky-Dink's--breathing. At first I thought he might be dead, he was so quiet. Then I heard his lips move in the rhapsodic deglutition of babyland dreams. "Dinky-Dunk," I demanded, "what would we do if Babe should die?" And I shook him to make him answer. He stared up at me with a sleepy eye. "That whale?" he commented as he blinked contentedly down at his offspring and then turned over and went to sleep. But I slipped a hand in under little Dinky-Dink's body, and found it as warm as a nesting bird.
