It seemed to Theodosia then that the air would split asunder with a great crash, the flaw centering in her aunt’s hands and extending two ways across the solid of the room. She glanced at her uncle in distress and apprehension. His smile then was open and tender, and he reached across and touched her hand with his palm while he finished saying something to her grandfather, and then he said: “What does Ladybug want? I know what’ll be good for her. Doe, le’s pour some more cream in her milk, outen the cream pitcher. Take this glass around to Miss Doe, Lucas. She needs it to grow on. Growen like a weed now, Ladybug is. What does Little Lady want on her plate? Doe, Little Lady’s got not one thing on her plate.” * * * * * The memories of his college sat lightly upon his mind, guests indulgently entertained when they were given any recognition. He had never overtaken the attitude of learning. Anthony would bring some book to the portico and read aloud, or he would say, “Do you remember Thomas, old Thomas?” A professor in some college he would mean. “English letters.... He loved it too well to teach it well....” The aunt would sit with her hands folded in her lap, a smile that scarcely belonged to her lips hovering over the bent hands while the man’s voice intoned the sumptuous lines. She had heard him read all this before, but she lent herself gracefully to the act, and Tom Singleton lowered his head, remembering, or he would glance up at Anthony’s face when some new guest arrived and was joyously greeted and housed for the time in elegant chambers. The reading: Three thousand years of sleep unsheltered hours. Anthony Bell’s hair was thinly grizzled. His hands were familiar upon the book, his voice well-used to the words of the poets. Vertical lines lay parallel across his cheeks. His mouth was thin-lipped and shut down at the corners with drooping plumes, feathered lines that frayed out upon the skin. Tramping the slant winds on high With golden-sandalled feet that glow.... Theodosia thought sometimes, when he read aloud, seeing his moving mouth running perpetually along the channels of song, that he must know some eternals, some truths, some ways unknown to her, and she would yearn with an inner sob of longing that he might impart this thing to her, whatever it might be. It was known to his body rather, to his delicate hands bent lovingly at the edges of a book, his sitting posture, his mouth that rolled out the elegant words and was unafraid of any word or saying. She would sit quietly among these, her elders, trying to understand, gaining a rich exaltation where the words revealed their splendor even if they withheld their thought. She was eleven years old. These are Jove’s tempest-walking hounds Whom he gluts on groans and blood....