He shook his head with a smile:
"To reach over in California, tear one of those big trees up by the roots, dip it in the crater of Vesuvius and write her name in letters of fire across the sky!"
He ended with a wide, sweeping gesture, showing just how he would inscribe it.
"Really!" the father laughed.
"That's how I feel!" he cried, springing to his feet with an emphatic gesture, a smile playing about his firm mouth.
The father slipped his arm around him:
"Well, if you should happen to do it, be sure to stand in the ocean, because otherwise, you know, if the grass should be dry you might set the world on fire."
The boy broke into a hearty laugh, crossed to the table, and threw his leg carelessly over the corner, a habit he had gotten from his father. When the laugh had died away, he picked up a magazine and said carelessly:
"I guess there's no danger, after all. I'm afraid that the big thing poets sing about is only a myth after all"—he paused, raised his eyes and they rested on his mother's portrait, and his voice became a reverent whisper—"except your love for my mother, Dad—that was the real thing!"
He was looking the other way and couldn't see the cloud of anguish that suddenly darkened his father's face.