“All right,” said God, grandly, throwing away his cane. “You can go.”
His legs found themselves only when he had reached the playground.
But oh, the brave autumn and the songs they sang; harvest, and the painting of a leaf; and “half-holiday to-day”; and “up in the air so high”; and the other one about the train—“the stations go whistling past”; the mellow days, the opening gates of desire, the smoky sun, the dropping patter of dead leaves.
“Every little snowflake is different in shape from every other.”
“Good grashus! ALL of them, Miss Pratt?”
“All of the little snowflakes that ever were. Nature never repeats herself.”
“Aw!”
Ben’s beard was growing: he had shaved. He tumbled Eugene on the leather sofa, played with him for hours, scraped his stubble chin against the soft face of his brother. Eugene shrieked.
“When you can do that you’ll be a man,” said Ben.
And he sang softly, in his thin humming ghost’s voice:
"The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse door, He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got sore. The woodpecker pecked at the schoolhouse bell, He pecked and he pecked till his pecker got well."
They laughed—Eugene with rocking throatiness, Ben with a quiet snicker. He had aqueous gray eyes, and a sallow bumpy skin. His head was shapely, the forehead high and bony. His hair was crisp, maple-brown. Below his perpetual scowl, his face was small, converging to a point: his extraordinarily sensitive mouth smiled briefly, flickeringly, inwardly—like a flash of light along a blade. And he always gave a cuff instead of a caress: he was full of pride and tenderness.
