I, Libertine by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon [Ewing, Frederick R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-1010-7
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-04-30T20:36:00+00:00

9.

MISS CALLOW WAS FLATTERED.

Miss Callow had been flattered every day for a week now, what with the new obedience she got from the girls, the respectful astonishment granted her by Sir Gregory, and most of all the daily presence of the grave young godling from Featherfront. Of the latter flattery Lance was of course aware, since he had planned it. She familiarized him with the others, gushing out her impressions with all the irresistibility of the newly open-hearted.

“They peep through the curtains when you come, the little dears. Barby jumps up and down and says ‘He’s walking! He’s walking!’ or ‘He’s riding!’ and Bella pushes her away from the window and she cries. Haha! The dears. Bella asked her father if when he was knighted he was given a suit of armor. She wanted him to lend you the suit of armor as a sort of game, so she could see you come riding up in the sunlight, the silly thing, imagine, armor in these times, and borrowed from a man his size!” She looked up at him and showed her teeth and the edges of her eyes, neither of which were quite white; her incisors looked like molars. “And since we’ve been walking every day, they watch me and watch me, wondering what I do, what I say, that makes you notice me; they obey so nicely and pay attention every minute. And then there’s poor dear Sir Gregory; I dare say he never noticed me in his life before except as an item ‘governess’ in his accounts and at his table. Since our little walks began, I can never so much as pass him in the hall but he stops and turns and watches me by, as much as to say, how do you do it, Callow! There’s a pipit”

Lance gravely inspected the flight of a small brown bird which flew like, and looked like, most other small brown birds his city-bred eyes had encountered. He made an interested sound, however. Even as alchemy had been Meadows’ bait, “natural philosophy” had been hers. “Natural philosophy,” in Hepzibah Callow’s lexicon, was very nearly what would one day be called “biology.” All living things were within its compass. The “philosophy” part of it was an untiring effort to link all things into one great shapely analogy; as the flowers do, so do the bees, and as the bees, cattle, camels and cormorants; as these do, so should man. It was a shockingly long time before Lance saw the pitfall in this. Having little interest in the specifics to begin with, it was only surprising that he caught up with the generalities when he did.

“Dragonfly,” she would croon, holding the four-winged horror four inches from his mouth, while, since he would not, his chin retreated and retreated until he was only neck, with a white frightened gash of a mouth, from nostrils to collarbone. He was morally certain that the monster would escape and zipzip! sew up his lips. “You see this little, ah, probe? It’s a daddy dragonfly.

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