Peter leant over her and stayed her hands. “I don’t like to see you work so hard.”
“It’s sweet to hear you say so, Peter.” He felt something splash and run down his fingers. “I love to hear you say that. But you see, there’s no one to care for us now. I’ve got to do it. I always shall have to do it, more and more.”
“Not when I’m a man.”
“When you’re a man, Peter? What then?”
“When I’m a man no one shall be sorry. I’ll make people ashamed of prisons and of letting other people be poor. No one shall go hungry. No one shall go unhappy. I’ll build happy houses everywhere. And, oh Glory, I’ll take all the little children with no shoes on their feet out into the country to where the grass is soft.”
She looked up at him with her grave gray eyes—eyes so much older than her years. “When you’re a man, Peter, you’ll be splendid.”
“But I didn’t say it to make you say that. I said it because I wanted you to know that there’s a day coming when—when instead of making you cry, dear Glory, I’ll make you laugh.”
“Just me, Peter, all by myself?”
She tilted back her head, gazing up at him, so that her hair rippled back across her shoulders and her throat stretched white and long, like a mermaid’s looking up through water, Peter thought.
“Just me only, Peter?”