“Wouldn’t they blare their horns before they got here?” Mary Elizabeth wanted to know.
“What was a knight for, anyway?” Delia demanded.
“For?” Margaret Amelia repeated, in a kind of personal indignation. “Why, to—to—to right wrongs, of course.”
Delia surveyed the surrounding scene through the diluted red ink in a glass-stoppered bottle.
“I guess I know that,” she said. “But I mean, what was his job?”
We had never thought of that. Did one, then, have to have a job other than righting wrongs?
Margaret Amelia undertook to explain.
“Why,” she said, “it was this way: Knights liberated damsels and razed down strongholds and took robber chieftains and got into adventures. And they lived off the king and off hermits.”
“But what was the end of ’em?” Delia wanted to know. “They never married and lived happily ever after. They married and just kept right on going.”
“That was on account of the Holy Grail,” said Mary Elizabeth. It was wonderful, as I look back, to remember how her face would light sometimes; as just then, and as when somebody came to school with the first violets.