“Would I do?” asked the Wind again, and made the dark like blown garments and like long, blown hair and tender motions, such as women make. And she took the Special Baby in her arms and rocked him as gently as boughs, so that he laughed with delight and tried to put the wind in his mouth and finally went to sleep, with his beads on.
“Now what’ll we do?” said the Great Black Hush, hanging about, all helpless and mighty.
“We can get along without a cradle,” said the Wind, “because I will rock him to sleep in my arms.” (This was before time began and before they laid them down to go to sleep alone in a dark room.) “But we ought, we ought,” she added, “to have something for him to play with when he wakes up.” (This was before time began and before anybody ate. But they always played. That came first.)
“If he had something to play with, what would that look like?” asked the Great Black Hush, all helpless.
“It musn’t have points like scissors, or ends like string, and the paint mustn’t come off. I think,” said the Wind, “it ought to look like a shining ball.”
“By my distance,” said the Great Black Hush, all mighty, “that’s what it shall look like.”
Then he began to make a plaything, and he worked all over him and all over everywhere at the fashioning. I don’t know how he did it, because I wasn’t there, and I can’t reckon how long it took him, because there wasn’t any time, but I know some things about it all, and one is that he finally got it done.
“Look!” the Great Black Hush cried to the Wind,—for she paid more attention to the Special Baby now than she did to him. And when she looked, there hung in the sky, a great, enormous, shining ball.
“That’s big enough so he can’t get it in his mouth,” she said approvingly. “It’s really ginginatic.”
“You mean gigantic, dear,” said the Great Black Hush, all superior. But the Wind didn’t care because words hadn’t been used long enough to fit closely, and besides he had said “dear” and she knew what that meant. “Dear” came before “gigantic.”