Sometimes he would awaken on summer nights and be so
filled with strange longing that he would creep out of bed and, pushing
open the window, sit upon the floor, his bare legs sticking out beyond his
white nightgown, and, thus sitting, yearn eagerly toward some fine
impulse, some call, some sense of bigness and of leadership that was
absent from the necessities of the life he led. He looked at the stars and
listened to the night noises, so filled with longing that the tears sprang
to his eyes.
Once, after the affair of the bugle, Jane McPherson had been ill--and the
first touch of the finger of death reaching out to her--had sat with her
son in the warm darkness in the little grass plot at the front of the
house. It was a clear, warm, starlit evening without a moon, and as the
two sat closely together a sense of the coming of death crept over the
mother.
At the evening meal Windy McPherson had talked voluminously, ranting and
shouting about the house. He said that a housepainter who had a real sense
of colour had no business trying to work in a hole like Caxton. He had
been in trouble with a housewife about a colour he had mixed for painting
a porch floor and at his own table he raved about the woman and what he
declared her lack of even a primitive sense of colour.
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