“I
      Float on the tide,
          In the rain. 
  I am the starfish vomited up by the retching cod. 
          He thinks
          That I am he. 
          But I know. 
          That he is I.
For the creature is far greater than its god.”

(Gerda was of those who think it is rather chic to have one rhyme in your poem, just to show that you can do it.)

“That child over there makes one feel so cheap and ridiculous, jabbering away.”

That was Barry, breaking off to look at Gerda where she lay on her elbows on a rug, idle and still.  “And it’s not,” he went on, “that she doesn’t know about the subject, either.  I’ve heard her on it.”

He threw the daisy chain he had just made at her, so that it alighted on her head, hanging askew over one eye.

“Just like a daisy bud herself, isn’t she,” he commented, and raced on, forgetting her.

Neat in her person and ways, Gerda adjusted the daisy chain so that it ringed her golden head in an orderly circle.  Like a daisy bud herself, Rodney agreed in his mind, his eyes smiling at her, his affection, momentarily turned that way, groping for the wild, remote little soul in her that he only vaguely and paternally knew.  The little pretty.  And clever, too, in her own queer, uneven way.  But what was she, with it all?  He knew Kay, the long, sweet-tempered boy, better.  For Kay represented highly civilized, passably educated, keen-minded youth.  Gerda wasn’t highly civilized, was hardly passably educated, and keen would be an inapt word for that queer, remote, woodland mind of hers....  Rodney returned to more soluble problems.

4

Mrs. Hilary and Grandmama came to Windover.  Mrs. Hilary would rather have come without Grandmama, but Grandmama enjoyed the jaunt, as she called it.  For eighty-four, Grandmama was wonderfully sporting.  They arrived on Saturday afternoon, and rested after the journey, as is usually done by people of Grandmama’s age, and often by people of Mrs. Hilary’s.  Sunday was full of such delicate clashings as occur when new people have joined a party.  Grandmama was for morning church, and Neville drove her to it in the pony carriage.  So Mrs. Hilary, not being able to endure that they should go off alone together, had to go too, though she did not like church, morning or other.

She sighed over it at lunch.

“So stuffy.  So long.  And the hymns....”

But Grandmama said, “My dear, we had David and Goliath.  What more do you want?”

During David and Goliath Grandmama’s head had nodded approvingly, and her thin old lips had half smiled at the valiant child with his swaggering lies about bears and lions, at the gallant child and the giant.

Mrs. Hilary, herself romantically sensible, as middle-aged ladies are, of valour and high adventure, granted Grandmama David and Goliath, but still repined at the hymns and the sermon.