“Of course, brother, and I only meant that lately so many things are stirring in the Forest that it seems more like the Forest wasn’t a scrap set off by itself. I seem to have lots of scraps floating in my mind lately––things I’ve heard, and all are taking on meaning now. I remember someone saying, I guess it was the Bishop, that in a drop of ocean water, there was all that went into the ocean’s making, except size. That didn’t mean anything until Brace set me to––to turning over in my mind, and, Peter, it seems terrible sensible now. 109 All the big, big world is just little scraps of King’s Forests welded all together and every King’s Forest is a drop of the world.”
Peter looked gravely troubled as men often do when their women take to thinking on their own lines. Usually the heedless man dismisses the matter with but small respect, but Peter was not that kind. All his life he had depended upon his sister’s “vision” as he called it. He might laugh and tease her, but he never took a definite step without reaching out to her.
“A man must plant his foot solid on the path he knows,” he often said, “but that don’t hinder him from lifting his eyes to the sky.” And it was through Aunt Polly’s eyes that Peter caught his view of skies.
“I don’t exactly like Brace digging down into things so much.” Peter gave a troubled sigh. “Some things ain’t any use when they are dug up.”
“But some things are, brother. We must know.”
“Well, by gosh!” Peter began to sway toward the door like a heavily freighted side-wheeler. “I get to feeling sometimes as if I’d kicked over a hornet’s nest and wasn’t certain whether it was a last year’s one or this year’s. In one case you can hold your ground, in the other you best take to your heels. Well, I’m going to leave you, Polly, for your date with your young man. Don’t forget the fire and don’t set up too long.”
Left to herself, Polly neatly folded her knitting and stuck the glistening needles through it. She folded her small, shrivelled hands and a radiant smile touched her old face.
Oh! the luxury of daring to sit up for a man. The excitement of the adventure! And while she waited and brooded, Polly was thinking as she had never done until recently. All her life she believed that she had thought, and to suddenly find, as she had lately, that her conclusions were either wrong or confused made her humble.
Now there was Mary-Clare! Why, from her birth, Mary-Clare had been an open book! Poor Polly shook her head. An open book? Well, if so she did not know the language 110 in which that book was written, for Mary-Clare was troubling her now deeply.
And Larry? Larry had suddenly come into focus, and Maclin, and Northrup. They all seemed reeling around her; all united, but in deadly peril of being flung apart.