So she asked Ojeeg, who was now become so respectable that he was carrying the mail, to bring her from the Soo a little manganese dioxide. She wrote the magical words for him on a piece of birch bark, and next time he not only brought the stuff to her in the clearing, but stood by and watched her mix it with hydrochloric acid, heat it, and collect the chlorine in a bottle. They sniffed it and understood perfectly why it choked soldiers to death. And long after Ojeeg left her, she stood pondering that greenish yellow mist through its glass prison. It seemed incredible that human beings would deliberately roll that death along the ground to fill the nostrils of other human beings. But it had been done, and when the madness again seized on men it would be done again. But there in her silent retreat among life-giving wintry airs she determined that no son of hers should ever be compelled to breathe chlorine. Chapter 76. Osmium 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.