There was a trace of real surprise and disappointment in her voice.
‘Well,’ he answered truthfully, ‘I had often and often thought about it, and wondered sometimes—whether——’
But the child interrupted him almost imperiously. He realised sharply how the knowledge that the years bring—little, exact, precise knowledge—may kill the dreams of the naked soul, yet give nothing in their place but dust and ashes. And, by the same token, he recognised that his own heart was still untouched, unspoiled. The blood leaped and ran within him at the thought.
‘The winds, too, are alive,’—she spoke with a solemn excitement that made her delicate face flush as though a white fire glowed suddenly beneath the skin and behind the charming eyes—‘they run about, and sleep, and sing, and are full of voices. The wind has hundreds of voices—just like insects with such a lot of eyes.’ (Even her strange simile did not make him smile, so real was the belief and enthusiasm of her words.) ‘We (with scorn) have only one voice; but the wind can laugh and cry at the same time!’
‘I’ve heard it,’ he put in, secretly thrilled.
‘I know its angry voice as well as its pretended-angry voice, when it’s very loud but means nothing in particular. Its baby-voice, when it comes through the keyhole at night, or down the chimney, or just outside the window in the early morning, and tells me all its little very-wonderful-indeed aventures, makes me so happy I want to cry and laugh at once.’
She paused a moment for breath, dimly conscious, perhaps, that her description was somewhat confused. Her excitement somehow communicated itself to Pouf at the same time, for the kitten suddenly rose up with an arched back and indulged in a yawn that would have cracked the jaws of any self-respecting creature. After a prolonged stare at Paul, it proceeded inconsequently to wash itself with an air that plainly said, ‘You won’t catch me napping again. I want to hear this too.’
Paul, meanwhile, stared at the child beside him, thinking that the gold-dust on her hair must surely come from her tumbling journeys among the stars, and wondering if she understood how deeply she saw into the heart of things with those dreamy blue eyes of hers.
‘Listen, Nixie, you fairy-child, and I’ll tell you something,’ he said gently, ‘something you will like very much’; and, while she waited and held her breath, he whispered softly in her ear:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: