The child is but seven--that is, her body and brain are but seven. Her talk with her mother is the talk of a pair of immortals.... Wheat bread and butter for supper, peaches of the mother's canning--a last jar, she said, with comb-honey for sweetening and golden cream on top. It was a repast for the mountain-top where demi-gods stray--all miracles about us, Apollo just putting his steeds away, Vulcan smoking sombre and wrathful in the distance. Can you see me sitting down to supper in a true handmade house, at the head of a God-made portal to the lake (the lane is nothing less) in a grove of white beeches--lingering gold on the vines at the window, the murmur of hives in the air, and these two mystic presences subduing their radiance to sit with me?... There's a little can of tea that is opened the last thing after the table is spread; the brass kettle begins to sing, and the mother hovers over--a kind of sacred rite, all this--then the dancing water is poured over the leaves and the room softly fills with the air of far archipelagoes. Roses of Ireland and France are in the room. Tearoses--some daughter of poetry must have named them. ... Still I am telling you about _things_--not about _them_. I thought I should write you what they are, yet the longer I sit here, the more testaments of their adorable lives appear, but their spirits draw farther apart.... There is never a drone of talk where they are ... sentences and silences, the myriad voices of evening stealing into the hushes between.... I must get down to earth again. I must begin with the grass and the shore and the magic which began when the child turned up to me from the frowning clay.... I should like to report them moment by moment--to make you see, but there is a fixed purpose in this chapter. Sitting apart from them that first night, I contemplated the North America of the future--a kind of dream that nestles within a dream--the Great Companions, superb men and women, the vastness of leisure, the structural verity of joy, a new dimension in the human mind, a new colour and redolence in the light that plays upon the teeming world. Not for years had I been so near to the dithyrambic.... I went out into the dusk and smoked a machine-made cigarette--not for worlds would I desecrate that room. I returned drowsy--opened the casement windows wide to the stars. As I put out the lights, the sense came to me that the little room was as fragrant and sweet as a new-woven basket.