“—But dreams ought to be wholesome, they ought to be worth while, they ought to teach an uplifting moral, and certainly they ought not to be about incomprehensible thin nonsense that nobody can half way understand. They ought, in a word, to make you feel that the world is a pretty good sort of place, after all—”
“But, wife, I am not sure that it is,” said Miramon, mildly.
“Then, the more shame to you! and the very least you can do is to keep such morbid notions to yourself, and not be upsetting other people’s repose with them!”
“I employ my natural gift, I express myself and none other. The rose-bush does not put forth wheat, nor flax either,” returned the sorcerer, with a tired shrug. “In fine, what would you have?”
“A great deal it means to you,—you rose-bush!—what I prefer! But if I had my wish your silly dream-making would be taken away from you so that we might live in some sort of reputable and common-sense way.”
All the while that she reasoned sensibly and calmly with her husband for his own good, Gisèle had feverishly been dusting things everywhere, just to show what a slave she was to him, and because it irritated Miramon to have his personal possessions thus dabbed at and poked about: and now, as she spoke, Gisèle slapped viciously with her scouring-rag at the black cross. And a thing happened to behold which would have astonished the innumerous mages and the enchanters who had given over centuries to searching for the cantrap which would release the bees of Toupan. For now without any exercise of magic the scouring-rag swept from the stone one of the insects. Koshchei, who made all things as they are, had decreed, they report, that these bright perils could be freed only in the most obvious way, because he knew this would be the last method attempted by any learned person.
Then for an instant the walls of the ivory tower were aquiver like blown veils. And the bee passed glitteringly to the window and through the clear glass of the closed window, leaving a small round hole there, as the creature went to join its seven fellows in the Pleiades.
14.
The Changing That Followed
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