“If you will,” he said.
Read Barbara:
“I saw you toss the kites on high
And blow the birds about the sky
And all around I heard you pass,
Like ladies’ skirts across the grass—
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!
I saw the different things you did,
But always you yourself you hid,
I felt you push, I heard you call,
I could not see yourself at all—
O wind, a-blowing all day long,
O wind, that sings so loud a song!”
Her voice, flowing on like a brook over pebbles, fell to a sudden silence, as the wind of which she had been reading entered with a sudden rush, veering the yellow flame of the lamp to one side.
Jimmy laughed joyously.
“It’s come in here,” he said, turning a sleepily roguish face upon Jarvis, “to hear what you’re saying, Barb’ra.”
She closed the book and laid it quietly upon the table.
“You must go to bed now, Jimmy,” she said.
The little boy whispered in her ear, his hands clasped about her neck. Her arm stole about his small body as she bent her head to listen. Jarvis watched the two hungrily—the child and the woman, and the eternal, unfading beauty of the picture smote him with almost intolerable poignancy. All that was best in life he had missed, blunderingly, blindly, and for what?
“I go to bed all by myself now,” the little boy said proudly.