“And I a student most diligent.”
Peg came and stood close against my shoulder where I sat at the desk. Her color and her brightness had returned to chase away the shadows. With her fingers she parted my hair where the frosts of two score years and four were beginning their blight. She made as though she considered these ravages of silver.
Finally, she spoke to me in a way tenderly good.
“Watch-dog, watch-dog, you have eyes in your head and none in your wits. You are a blind-wit, watch-dog, a blind-wit of no hope. And you would study Peg? Teach I never so lucidly, study thou never so long, yet shouldst thou never know Peg, but die in darkness of her.” Peg said this with a kind of murmur of regret. Then, collecting direction: “How many times has Peg been with you? And yet you have never seen her—never once seen Peg. You do not see Peg now while she stands at your shoulder. You are a blind-wit.”
“If I have not seen Peg,” said I, “and if I do not now see Peg, then at the least my eyes have tasted visions above report.”
“Now you speak well,” quoth Peg, with an archness of pretended approval.
Here, surely, should be the old, true Peg. It was a delight to listen to the bantering yet soft tones of her, like walking in the May woods with their new green and the new blossoms painting the ground about one's feet.
“What have I seen, then?” I asked, going back a pace.
“What have you seen? A mirage, the mere mirage of Peg—her picture, sketched on the skies of your ideal.” Then in a playful manner of correction, as when a girl refuses a compliment: “You have looked upward, watchdog, when you should have looked down. And now for your first lesson. This is the text of it: Would you find a woman, keep your eyes on the ground.”
For all Peg's humor of gaiety, I could tell how she was under greatest strain. Also, there ran an odd current of reproach throughout her words. It was as though she saw faults in me.