"Oh, Peter," I said, "if one were a wizard!"
"I didn't understand," said Peter.
"How pleasant it would be to make folk love folk," I put it.
He understood that. "Wouldn't it, though?" he assented wistfully. So does everybody understand. Wouldn't it, though! Oh, don't you wish you could?
In the silence which fell I kept on looking at those starry tea-leaves until I protest that a thought awoke in my mind as if it wanted to be somebody. Be Somebody. It was as if it came alive, quite without my will, so that almost I could see it. It was a friend conferring in my head. Perhaps it was the Custodian herself, come outside to that white porch of the moon.
"Peter," I said, "I think I'm going to tell you a story."
For I longed to make him patient with Miggy, as men, who understand these things first, are not always patient with women, who often and often understand too late.
He listened to the story as I am setting it down here—the story of the New Village. But in it I could say nothing of how, besides by these things celestial, cosmic, I was touched by the simple, human entreaty of the big, baffled man and that about his hands and the way his hair sticks up at the back.