red feet away.

One day, bending over him, her hair (drying from a salt-water swim)
flying about him, the one-woman, her two hands holding his head and jowls
so that his ribbon of kissing tongue just missed her nose in the empty
air, sang to him: "'Don't know what to call him, but he's mighty lak' a
rose!'"

On another day she repeated this, at the same time singing most of the
song to him softly in his ear. In the midst of it Jerry surprised her.
Equally true might be the statement that he surprised himself. Never,
had he consciously done such a thing before. And he did it without
volition. He never intended to do it. For that matter, the very thing
he did was what mastered him into doing it. No more than could he
refrain from shaking the water from his back after a swim, or from
kicking in his sleep when his feet were tickled, could he have avoided
doing this imperative thing.

As her voice, in the song, made soft vibrations in his ears, it seemed to
him that she grew dim and vague before him, and that somehow, under the
soft searching prod of her song, he was otherwhere. So much was he
otherwhere that he did the surprising thing. He sat down abruptly,
almost cataleptically, drew his head away from the clutch of her hands
and out of the entanglement of her hair, and, his nose thrust upward at
an angle of forty-five degrees, he began to quiver and to breathe audibly
in rhythm to the rhythm of her singing. With a quick jerk,
cataleptically, his nose pointed to the zenith, his mouth opened, and a
flood of sound poured forth, running swiftly upward in crescendo and
slowly falling as it died away.

This howl was the beginning, and it led to the calling him "Sing Song
Silly." For Villa Kennan was quick to seize upon the howling her singing
induced and to develop it. Never did he hang back when she sat down,
extended her welcoming hands to him, and invited: "Come on, Sing Song
Silly." He would come to her, sit down with the loved fragrance of her
hair in his nostrils, lay the side of his head against hers, point his
nose past her ear, and almost immediately follow her when she began her
low singing. Minor strains were especially provocative in getting him
started, and, once started, he would sing with her as long as she wished.

Singing it truly was. Apt in all ways of speech, he quickly learned to
soften and subdue his howl till it was mellow and golden. Even could he
manage it to die away almost to a wh