After they had finished she remembered looking out of the window and watching the big white clouds drift across the pale bright April sky. They were full of hundreds of drops of water, she thought, that were going to fall into hundreds of other brooks, and then travel and work till they reached the sea, and then rest for a while and begin all over again. Her dark eyes grew very wide as she watched the endless procession of white mountains move across the great arch of the sky. Her imagination was stirred almost painfully, her mind expanding with the effort to take in the new conception of size, of great numbers, of the small place of her own brook, her own field in the hugeness of the world. And yet it was an ordered hugeness full of comforting similarity! Now, no matter where she might go, or what brooks she might see, she would know that they were all of one family, that the same things happened to them all, that every one ended in the ocean. Something she had read on a piece of paper made her see the familiar home field with the yellow water of the little creek, as a part of the whole world. It was very strange. She tried to tell Mother something of what was in her mind, but, though Mother listened in a sympathetic silence, it was evident that she could make nothing out of the incoherent account. Sylvia thought that she would try to tell Father, the next chance she had. Even at seven, although she loved her mother passionately and jealously, she was aware that her father's mind was more like her own. He understood some things that Mother didn't, although Mother was always, always right, and Father wasn't. She fell into silence again, standing by her mother's knee, staring out of the window and watching the clouds move steadily across the sky doing their share of the world's work for all they looked so soft and lazy. Her mother did not break in on this meditative contemplation. She took up her sewing-basket and began busily to sew buttons on a small pair of half-finished night-drawers. The sobered child beside her, gazing up at the blue-and-white infinity of the sky, heard faintly and distantly, for the first time in her life, the whirring reverberations of the great mystic wheel of change and motion and life.