Hobart Eddy said: No. That he should not mind that.
“And then after dark we’ll start home,” Pelleas went on, “but long enough after dark so that we can walk on some open road and see the stars. Orion will be done for by then,” he recalled frowning. “Orion and Jupiter are about below the west by dark even now. But Leo is overhead—and the Dragon and Cassiopeia in the north—and Spica and Vega and Arcturus in the east. O, we shall have friends enough. It is now,” said Pelleas, “forty-nine years that Etarre and I have watched for them every year. We began to study them the Summer that we were married. Forty-nine years and they have never failed us once. What do you think of that?”
Hobart folded our list and handed it back.
“Do you know,” he said solemnly, “that I wouldn’t know whether Hepatica was a bird or a constellation? Jove,” he added, “what a lot of worlds.”
As for me I sat nodding with all my might. Yes, what a lot of worlds.
“Will you give us a day, Hobart?” Pelleas repeated.
“With all my heart,” Hobart Eddy said simply.
“We’ll take Viola with us!” I cried then joyfully. “She knows all these things better than we.”
“She does?” exclaimed Hobart. “At her age? I believe they have actually begun to educate people for living,” he observed, “instead of for earning a living. I dare say lots of people know this kind of thing—people in cafés and cars and around, whom one never suspects of knowing,” he added thoughtfully.
Pelleas and I have sometimes said that of the most unpromising people: Perhaps after all they know the birds and wait for the stars to come back. Not that this would prove them good citizens. But neither do the most utilitarian faculties prove them so.