During the winter nights she slept long. When she dreamed, which was not
often, it was always a happy dream. Mother was alive again and taking
all the responsibilities, or Horatio was happily married and living
across the river, or Marvin was again covering her with a blanket there
in the rifle pit by the old fort. Once she awoke with a sense, ethereal
and unashamed, that all night long she had been sleeping in his arms.
But these tricks of desire were quickly supplanted, as she lay there
cuddled like a dormouse, by her habitual sense of wonder. Explanations
of dreams seemed to her unimportant compared with the unexplainable fact
that dreams seem real. The fact of the illusion always amused her. Every
night even the wisest of mankind believes some absurdity.
Indeed God got along very well for a third of the time without the
advice of his earthly children. Daily he gently slew them all, and laid
them in comfortable graves, and let them stay dead for eight hours or
so. It was a wonder that anybody ever came to life in the morning, but
everybody did. What was more curious, everybody went about his daily
task fancying himself the author of himself.
Nowadays she hardly ever got up to see the morning star, but contented
herself with the assurance that it was there in the east. It was almost
exactly the size of the earth, but not quite so closely grained. Venus
was only five times as dense as water, whereas earth is six.
Blessed is the girl who can console herself with the densities of
morning stars. She preserved a normal curiosity about physical whys and
wherefores, which are the best medicine in the world for too much self.
She wondered why the particles of a metal stick so close together.
Lucretius had said it was because the atoms were hooked. It did rather
look as if in some way they overlapped, but then it also looked as if
the atoms themselves were compressed. She wondered what force could be
so tremendous as to squeeze atoms into iron, nickel, ruthenium, rhodium,
palladium, and osmium, each a little denser than the preceding.
And what made a metal like sodium unite with a gas like chlorine to make
table-salt? She would always thrill to the taste of a little salt on a
stalk of crisp celery, but she would thrill a good deal more if she knew
what really happened when those atoms wedded.