'Yes, everybody in turn—except Dustiefoot. Do you know, he runs about as if nothing had happened to him, with merely the prettiest limp in the world.'
'Are these white roses off the bush close to the myall acacia by the Oolloolloo?' he asked, bending over to count the number clustered on one slender spray.
'Yes; it is only rose-trees close to flowing water that bear such roses. How I should like to paint them or embalm them in fitting verse!'
'But they come back again next spring in all their old witchery. It is only human lives that can never be repeated—never be acted over but once.'
'Unless they are like the tags of old rhymes and the rain-clouds that fall and are evaporated and come back in a dragon-fly's wings, or a plant struggling for life on the edge of a desert.'
'Wicked child! you are laughing at me to my face. But whether or not we come back like the roses, or the creatures you so much object to that have more legs than four, every day is as fresh and keenly interesting now as if it were created for us individually.'
She felt that they were getting on dangerous ground, and sought safety by retreating to a more impersonal region in the persiflage that came to her so readily.
'And yet to superior beings on a better ordered planet, I suppose our lives would seem little better than blobs in a world heaped up with tumbled cobwebs.'
'What is a blob?'
'Do you go out into the woods in the early mornings?'