She laid her hand on my forearm. My sleeves were uprolled to the elbows.
"Dearest," she exclaimed in sudden anxiety, "you're cold!" I suppose I was, but I had not known it.
It has been some time now since I have written in the diary which had its birth under such strange circumstances. The narrative went into a pigeon-hole because I have been too busy living to think of reflecting upon life. It was a device for moments of emptiness and in later times also for moments of extraordinary jubilation, but since the last pages were scribbled there has been enough of celebration in merely living out the days. Yet now I must add a postscript, so that some time He may have the full record before him. He is my little son.
He is teaching me a great many things and finding in me a willing pupil. When I first walked out into the public ways after his entrance to the stage whereon I hope he will be cast in a worthy part, I walked differently. I walked with the pride of an emperor. Not the pride of arrogance. I needed no car of ivory and bronze with captives marching fettered at its wheel. I needed no slave to whisper in my ear, "Remember, Cæsar, thou art but a man." I was filled with a new graciousness and wished to be generously courteous to all men, yet that desire was born of a sense of vast superiority. I had found the meaning of life; the secret of which the gulls shrieked in mating-time around the rocks of the island--though then my ears were deaf to its significance.
She has minted from the precious metal of her soul a life which, with the other lives of his day, will form the mosaic of his times. I have the prospect before me of new miracles as that new life unfolds. I feel the exaltation of being undeservedly linked with something vastly greater than myself. I made an awkward effort once to put some part of this idea into words, but Frances only laughed. To her it is all quite natural. Her only comment was that he is as much mine as hers, which was a flattery that even my egotism could scarcely assimilate.
We have not named him yet, but an idea struck me a day or two ago while I was sitting at my down-town desk, and I straightway called her up.
"I have just thought of a name," I said. "I want to call him Francis Ra-Tuiki. Of course," I hastened to add, realizing that the silence at the other end of the wire threatened protest, "of course we can dignify it with highly unphonetic spelling, if you like."