'Yes, no,' said Joan.
'Answer me properly, girl,' he observed.
'Of course not. Move nearer to you—and me—even to grandpa. We ought to be a flock somehow, I felt. But we looked so separate and apart, you two on chairs, reading, him out of sight, and me on the window-sill.'
'Eh?'
'We ought to be one thing more. The whole world ought to be. Not crowded—oh, there'd be heaps of room to move in—but all together somehow like birds. It's only bad birds that are apart—ravens, hawks, and birds of prey. All the others flock.' She darted from his knee and stood upon her toes a second before him, staring down into his eyes. 'It's coming, you know, Daddy. It's coming, anyhow!' She said it brightly, eagerly, yet with a singular conviction in her tone. 'The whole world's flocking somehow—somewhere—for I feel it. We shall all be happy together once we get into the country.'
A shiver of beauty passed through him as he heard her. He remembered his walk up Maida Vale, and the rushing, shadowy presentiment in his mind that something new was on the way.
'Like a single big family, you mean? All after one high big thing together?' He asked it, greatly wondering at her. But her reply made him gasp. Where had she learned such things, unless from the air?
'Your language is so draughty, Daddy. I mean a bird-world. Birds aren't unselfish, they're just—together.'
He rubbed his forehead, saying nothing, while she fluttered down upon his knees again.
'Like my body,' she said. 'Don't you see?'