speak; but everything has meaning--placards leaning against
doorways--names above shop-windows--red fruit in baskets--women's heads
in the hairdresser's--all say "Minnie Marsh!" But here's a jerk. "Eggs
are cheaper!" That's what always happens! I was heading her over the
waterfall, straight for madness, when, like a flock of dream sheep, she
turns t'other way and runs between my fingers. Eggs are cheaper.
Tethered to the shores of the world, none of the crimes, sorrows,
rhapsodies, or insanities for poor Minnie Marsh; never late for
luncheon; never caught in a storm without a mackintosh; never utterly
unconscious of the cheapness of eggs. So she reaches home--scrapes her
boots.

Have I read you right? But the human face--the human face at the top of
the fullest sheet of print holds more, withholds more. Now, eyes open,
she looks out; and in the human eye--how d'you define it?--there's a
break--a division--so that when you've grasped the stem the butterfly's
off--the moth that hangs in the evening over the yellow flower--move,
raise your hand, off, high, away. I won't raise my hand. Hang still,
then, quiver, life, soul, spirit, whatever you are of Minnie Marsh--I,
too, on my flower--the hawk over the down--alone, or what were the worth
of life? To rise; hang still in the evening, in the midday; hang still
over the down. The flicker of a hand--off, up! then poised again. Alone,
unseen; seeing all so still down there, all so lovely. None seeing, none
caring. The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. Air
above, air below. And the moon and immortality.... Oh, but I drop to the
turf! Are you down too, you in the corner, what's your
name--woman--Minnie Marsh; some such name as that? There she is, tight
to her blossom; opening her hand-bag, from which she takes a hollow
shell--an egg--who was saying that eggs were cheaper? You or I? Oh, it
was you who said it on the way home, you remember, when the old
gentleman, suddenly opening his umbrella--or sneezing was it? Anyhow,
Kruger went, and you came "home a back way," and scraped your boots.
Yes. And now you lay across your knees a pocket-handkerchief into which
drop little angular fragments of eggshell--fragments of a map--a puzzle.
I wish I could piece them together! If you would only sit still. She's
moved her knees--the map's in bits again. Down the slopes of the Andes
the white blocks of marble go bounding and hurtling, crushing to death a
whole troop of Span