It brushed past him overhead, beneath, on all sides.
He peered up at it and marvelled, unconvinced, yet knowing himself a
prisoner. Something he could not understand was coming, was already
close, was watching him, waiting the moment to pounce out, like an
invisible cat upon a bewildered mouse. The question he flung out
brought no response, and he recalled with a smile the verse that
described his absurd position:--
Like a mouse who, lost in wonder,
Flicks its whiskers at the thunder!
For, while sprites and yearning were decidedly his own, the
interpretation of them, if not their actual origin, seemed another's.
This other, like some dear ideal on the way to realisation, had taken
him prisoner. The queer sense of anticipation Bourcelles had fostered
was now actual expectation, as though some Morning Spider had borne
his master-longing, exquisitely fashioned by the Story, across the
Universe, and the summons had been answered-from the Pleiades. The
indestructible threads of thought and feeling tightened. The more he
thought about his cousin's interpretation the more he found in it a
loveliness and purity, a crystal spiritual quality, that he could
credit neither to the author's mind nor to his own. This soft and
starry brilliance was another's. Up to a point the interpretation came
through Daddy's brain, just as the raw material came through his own;
but there-after this other had appropriated both, as their original
creator and proprietor.
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