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Dolly, who had not been "told," ran out with offers of tea. He refused them, and ordered her to wheel baby's perambulator away, as they desired to be alone. "But the diddums can't listen; he isn't nine months old," she pleaded. "That's not what I was saying," retorted her father-in-law. Baby was wheeled out of earshot, and did not hear about the crisis till later years.
I hadn't quite realized just what we'd descended to. I hadn't imagined just how much one needed working capital, even out here on the edge of Nowhere. "But never that way, Diddums!" I cried out in dismay, as I pictured my husband bunking with a sweaty-smelling plowing-gang of Swedes and Finns and hoboing about the prairie with a thrashing outfit of the Great Unwashed.
I attempted to picture my daily existence with somebody else in the place that my Diddums had once filled. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't forget the old days. I couldn't forget the wide path of life that we'd traveled together, and that he was the father of my children my children who will always need him! and that he and he alone had been my torch-bearer into the tangled wilderness of passion.
It won't seem hard to do without things, when I think of those kiddies of mine, and hard work should be a great and glorious gift, if it is to give them the start in life which they deserve. We'll no longer quarrel, Diddums and I, about whether Dinkie shall go to Harvard or McGill. There'll be much closer problems than that, I imagine, before Dinkie is out of his knickers.
So instead of feeling sorry for myself, I began to feel sorry for my Diddums, even though he was trying to switch me off like an electric-light. And all of a sudden I came to a decision. I decided to write to Dinky-Dunk. That, I felt, would be safer than trying to see him. For in a letter I could say what I wanted to without being stopped or side-tracked.
And in her very helplessness, it was only too plain to me, his Cousin Allie might appeal to him in a more personal and more perilous way. My Diddums himself, of late, had appealed more to me in his weakness and his unhappiness than in his earlier strength and triumph. There was a time, in fact, when I had almost grown to hate his successes. And yet he was my husband. He was mine.
"Well, the only salon I ever saw in America had the commercial air of a millinery opening where tea happened to be served," I promptly declared. "And the only American woman I ever knew who wanted to have a salon was a girl we used to call Asafetida Anne. And if I explained why you'd make a much worse face than that, my Diddums.
I must see cook after tea, and Diddums, my sweet little kitten. How is the darling? As pretty and fluffy and playful as ever?" "Peggy dear, do not be silly!" "Esther dear, I cannot help it! I'm too happy to be sensible. Let me be silly for just one day. What, is that Diddums? That ugly, lanky, old cat? You've aged terribly, Diddums, since I saw you last. Ah me, ah me, the years tell on us all!
There were cooing tones which the dictagraph repeated with hideous fidelity. Zada asked, "Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?" And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, "Yes, he diddums, but worst was lonelying for his Zadalums." "Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly truly?"
Yet even that dip into politely erotic fiction seemed to canalize my poor little grass-grown mind into activity, and Diddums and I sat up until the wee sma' hours discoursing on life and letters. He started me off by somewhat pensively remarking that all women seem to want to be intellectual and have a salon. "No, Dinky-Dunk, I don't want a salon," I promptly announced.
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