Virgil.
The sound of her mother’s diligent scrubbing
in the hall came back slowly to Alice’s hearing,
as she restored the letter to the packet, wrapped
the packet in its muslin covering, and returned it
to the drawer. She had remained upon her knees
while she read the letter; now she sank backward,
sitting upon the floor with her hands behind her,
an unconscious relaxing for better ease to think.
Upon her face there had fallen a look of wonder.
For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that
life is everlasting movement. Youth really believes
what is running water to be a permanent crystallization
and sees time fixed to a point: some people have
dark hair, some people have blond hair, some people
have gray hair. Until this moment, Alice had
no conviction that there was a universe before she
came into it. She had always thought of it as
the background of herself: the moon was something
to make her prettier on a summer night.
But this old letter, through which she saw still flickering
an ancient starlight of young love, astounded her.
Faintly before her it revealed the whole lives of
her father and mother, who had been young, after all—they
really had—and their youth was now
so utterly passed from them that the picture of it,
in the letter, was like a burlesque of them.
And so she, herself, must pass to such changes, too,
and all that now seemed vital to her would be nothing.
When her work was finished, that afternoon, she went
into her father’s room. His recovery had
progressed well enough to permit the departure of
Miss Perry; and Adams, wearing one of Mrs. Adams’s
wrappers over his night-gown, sat in a high-backed
chair by a closed window. The weather was warm,
but the closed window and the flannel wrapper had
not sufficed him: round his shoulders he had
an old crocheted scarf of Alice’s; his legs were
wrapped in a heavy comfort; and, with these swathings
about him, and his eyes closed, his thin and grizzled
head making but a slight indentation in the pillow
supporting it, he looked old and little and queer.
Alice would have gone out softly, but without opening
his eyes, he spoke to her: “Don’t
go, dearie. Come sit with the old man a little
while.”
She brought a chair near his. “I thought
you were napping.”
“No. I don’t hardly ever do that.
I just drift a little sometimes.”
“How do you mean you drift, papa?”
He looked at her vaguely. “Oh, I don’t
know. Kind of pictures. They get a little
mixed up—old times with times still ahead,
like planning what to do, you know. That’s
as near a nap as I get—when the pictures
mix up some. I suppose it’s sort of drowsing.”
She took one of his hands and stroked it. “What
do you mean when you say you have pictures like ’planning
what to do’?” she asked.
