"Ain't it funny how your voice gets away from you sometimes and goes dilly-nipping around, pretty near saying things on its own account? I use' to think that mebbe my voice didn't belong to the me I know about, but was some of the real me, inside, speaking out with my mouth for a trumpet. I donno but I think so yet. For sometimes your voice is a person and it says things all alone by itself. So his voice done then. The tender concern of it was pretty near a second set of words. It was the first time he had struck for her the great and simple note, the note of the caring of the man for the physical comfort of the woman. And while she was pretending not to need it, he turned away and looked off toward the village, and I was certain sure he was terrified at what might have been in his voice.
"'I like to think of it down there,' he said, pretty near at random, 'waiting to be clothed in a new meaning.'
"'The village?' she asked.
"'Everywhere,' he answered. 'Some of the meanings we dress things up in are so—dowdy. We wouldn't think of wearing them ourselves.'
"She understood him so well that she didn't have to bother to smile. And I hoped she was setting down a comparison in her head: Between clothing the world in a new meaning, and wearing it for a garment.
"Chris looked up in Insley's face.
"'I'm new,' he contributes, 'I'm new on the outside of me. I've got on this new brown middie.'
"'I've been admiring it the whole way,' says Insley, hearty—and that time his eyes and Robin's met, over the little boy's head, as we stopped at the cottage gate.