'
It was Jane Anne repeating the rhyme for Minks's benefit. How
appropriately it came in, he thought. And voices were set instantly in
motion; it seemed that every one began to speak at once.
Who finally led the conversation, or what was actually said at first,
he has no more recollection than the man in the moon, for he only
heard the silvery music of a single voice. And that came rarely. He
felt washed in glory from head to foot. In a dream of happy starlight
he swam and floated. He hid his face behind the chair of Monkey, and
his eyes were screened below the welcome shelter of Jimbo's shoulder.
The talk meanwhile flowed round the horse-shoe like a river that
curves downhill. Life ran past him, while he stood on the banks and
watched. He reconstructed all that happened, all that was said and
done, each little movement, every little glance of the eye. These
common things he recreated. For, while his body sat in the Den before
a fire of peat, with children, a cat, a private secretary, three very
ordinary people and a little foreign visitor, his spirit floated high
above the world among the immensities of suns and starfields. He was
in the Den, but the Den was in the universe, and to the scale of the
universe he set the little homely, commonplace picture. Life, he
realised, _is_ thought and feeling; and just then he thought and felt
like a god.
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