When Olie came in after dinner yesterday I asked him where my husband was. Olie, after some hesitation, admitted that he was out in the stable. I asked just what Dinky-Dunk was doing there, for I'd noticed that after each meal he slipped silently away. Again Olie hesitated. Then he finally admitted that he thought maybe my lord was out there smoking. So I went out, and there I found my poor old Dinky-Dunk sitting on a grain-box puffing gloomily away at his old pipe. For a minute or two he didn't see me, so I went right over to him. "What does this mean?" I demanded.
"Why?" he rather guiltily equivocated.
"Why are you smoking out here?"
"I--er--I rather thought you might think it wouldn't be good for the Boy!" He looked pathetic as he said that, I don't know why, though I loved him for it. He made me think of a king who'd been dethroned, an outsider, a man without a home. It brought a lump into my throat.
I wormed my way up close to him on the grain-box, so that he had to hold me to keep from falling off the end. "Listen to me," I commanded. "You are my True Love and my Kaikobád and my Man-God and my Soul-Mate! And no baby is ever going to come between me and you!"
"You shouldn't say those awful things," he declared, but he did it only half-heartedly.
"But I want you to sit and smoke with me, beloved, the same as you always did," I told him. "We can leave the windows open a little and it won't hurt Dinky-Dink, for that boy gets more ozone than any city child that was ever wheeled out in the Mall! It can't possibly hurt him. What hurts me is being away from you so much. And now give me a hug, a tight one, and tell me that you still love your Lady Bird!" He gave me two, and then two more, until Tumble-Weed turned round in his stall and whinnied for us to behave.
