doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with
hundreds of real boys ... in 1914.... It was the happiest day I ever
had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy. Well, then, as
you know, he couldn't get a commission, couldn't even get his stripe,
poor darling. He deserted twice--pure absence of mind--it was always the
same from a child--'I wanted to see further,' he'd say, and of course
worse in the trenches. Why, you know it all, Angela dear--at least,
perhaps not quite all. I should like to tell you--because you said that
about the splendour of being the mother of Rrchud....

"Pinehurst--my husband, he is a doctor, you know--had that same passion
for seeing further. He was often ill in London. I said it was asthma,
but he said it was not being able to see far enough. We were in America
for Rrchud's birth, and Pinehurst insisted on going West. I took the
precaution of having a good nurse with me. Pinehurst said the East was
full of little obstacles, and people's eyes had sucked all the secrets
out of the horizon, he said. I like Cape Cod, but he said there was
always a wall of sea round those flat wet places. We stayed in a
blacksmith's spare room on the desert of Wyoming, but even that horizon
seemed a little higher than we, and one clear day, in a pink sunrise, we
saw something that might have been a dream, my dears, and might have
been the Rockies. Pinehurst couldn't stand that, we pushed west--so
tahsome. We climbed a little narrow track up a mountain, in a light
buggy that a goldminer lent us. Oh, of course, you'll think us mad,
Meta, but, do you know, we actually found the world's edge, a place with
no horizon; we looked between ragged pine trees, and saw over the
shoulders of great old violet mountains--we saw right down into the
stars for ever.... There was a tower of rocks--rose-red rocks in sloping
layers--sunny hot by day, my dears, and a great shelter by night. You
know, the little dark clouds walk alone upon the mountain tops at