"And what do you think of being when you 're a man, Bran?"
Bran reflected a while, balancing a spoonful of strawberry ice-cream on the edge of his glass.
"Well, Daddy, sometimes I 'd like to be one of those professors that feed the animals at the Zoo, you know. But after all, I think I prefer to be an engine driver." The little golden face looked up into Westenra's with the perfect confidence and frankness of a nature that has never been snubbed or thwarted. "You see one could be always going to new places."
Westenra's heart sank. He got a sudden vision of Val smiling that very smile of boyish confidence as she looked up from a deck chair saying:
"I would love to wake up in a new place every morning of my life."
Good God! was it possible that it was after all only a child, no better or worse than this golden-headed stripling, whom he had had in his hands all these years, treating harshly, misjudging, scolding, neglecting? The thought was horrible, but it pierced as though it were true.
"What is the good of that, my boy?" he said gently. He shrank from losing that lovely confidence by an unsympathetic word, but--"What would you do in all those new places?"
"Do?" Bran mused a while. "Oh, there'd always be something to do, Daddy. Sometimes the people there would want a bridge made, or a tower built, or there might be a giant there eating all the little boys and girls. Then I would stay just long enough to kill the giant, you know, or make the bridge----"
"I see."
"Or sometimes I would just make a picture of the place."