“Now then!” said the Deev, disgustingly pompous.
But when he looked down, there, sitting on his own great foot, high and dry and pleasant, was Bit-bit, weaving his garment of sweet-grass and saying:
“Deevy dear, a river washed me up here and I was so busy I didn’t have time to get down.”
The Deev stood still, thinking, and his thoughts flew in and out like birds, but always they seemed to fly against window-panes in the air, through which there was no passing. And the Deev said, in his head:
“Is there nothing in this created cosmos that will stop this little scrap from working to clothe the world? Or must I play Deev in earnest?”
And that was what he finally decided to do. So he said things to his arms, and his arms hardened into stuff like steel, and spread out like mighty wings. And with these the Deev began to beat the air. And he beat it and beat it until it frothed. It frothed like white-of-egg and like cream and like the mid-waters of torrents, frothed a mighty froth, such as I supposed could never be. And when the froth was stiff enough to stand alone, the Deev took his steel-wing arm for a ladle, and he began to spread the froth upon the earth. And he spread and spread until the whole earth was like an enormous chocolate cake, thick with white frosting—one layer, two layers, three layers, disgustingly extravagant, so that the little Deevs, if there had been any, would never have got the dish scraped. Only there wasn’t any dish, so they needn’t have minded.
And when he had it all spread on, the Deev stood up and dropped his steel arms down—and even they were tired at the elbow, like any true, egg-beating arm—and he looked down at the great cake he had made. And there, on the top of the frosting, which was already beginning to harden, was sitting Bit-bit, weaving his garment of sweet-grass and talking about the weather:
“I think there is going to be a storm,” said Bit-bit, “the air around here has been so disgustingly hard to breathe.”
Then, very absently, the Deev let the steel out of his arms and made them get over being wings, and, in a place so deep in his own head that nothing had ever been thought there before, he thought:
“There is more to this than I ever knew there is to anything.”