"Yes, I know," he quietly affirmed, as he hung his head. "She told me about it. And it was _awful_. It should never have happened. It made me ashamed even--even to face you!"
"That was natural," I agreed, with my heart still steeled against him.
"It makes a fool of a man," he protested, "a situation like that."
"Then the right sort of man wouldn't encourage it," I reminded him, "wouldn't even permit it." And still again I caught that quick movement of impatience from him.
"What's that sort of thing to a man of my age?" he demanded. "When you get to where I am you don't find love looming so large on the horizon. What--"
"No, it clearly doesn't loom so large," I interrupted.
"What you want then," went on Dinky-Dunk, ignoring me, "is power, success, the consolation of knowing you're not a failure in life. _That's_ the big issue, and that's the stake men play big for, and play hard for."
It was, I remembered in my bitterness of soul, what I myself had been playing hard for--but I had lost. And it had left my heart dry. It had left my heart so dry that my own Dinky-Dunk, standing there before me in the open sunlight, seemed millions of miles removed from me, mysteriously depersonalized, as remote in spirit as a stranger from Mars come to converse about an inter-stellar telephone-system.
"Then you've really achieved your ambition," I reminded my husband, as he stood studying a face which I tried to keep tranquil under his inspection.
"Oh, no," he corrected, "only a small part of it."
"What's the rest?" I indifferently inquired, wondering why most of life's victories, after all, were mere Pyrrhic victories.
"You," declared Dinky-Dunk, with a reckless light in his eyes, "You, and the children, now that I'm in a position to give them what they want."
"Well, that's what I'm coming back to demonstrate," he found the courage to assert.
"To all of you!" he said with a valiant air of finality.
I told him it was useless, but he retorted that he didn't propose to have that stop him. I explained to him that it would be embarrassing, but he parried that claim by protesting that sacrifice was good for the soul. I asserted that it would be a good deal of a theatricality, under the circumstances, but he attempted to brush this aside by stating that what he had endured for years might be repeated by patience.