I am reading today, in the sun, and the woman says to her friend abruptly, "When my water broke." I left soon, misunderstanding rising like steam. I learned to skip a brick on the edge of Lake Michigan, I remember hearing stained-glass icebergs breaking with the waves. Words are hesitant and sly as all of art and commerce. When I talk to the dogs my voice sounds badly dubbed. I am reminded of Aristotle's Ethics: Loving seems like making. Wonder rises in the morning, lightly walking on top of my feet. We are nestled, going slowly, not falling.
"'Well, anyhow I said there was going to be an earthquake and there was one,' said Margaret.
That was what Emily was waiting for! So it really had been an Earthquake (she had not liked to ask, it seemed so ignorant, but now Margaret had said in so many words that it was one).
With that certainty, her soused excitement began to revive. For there was nothing, no adventure from the hands of God or Man, to equal it. Realize that if she had suddenly found she could fly it would not have seemed more miraculous to her. Heaven had played its last, most terrible card; and small Emily had survived, where even grown men (such as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram) had succumbed.
Life seemed suddenly a little empty: for never again could there happen to her anything so dangerous and sublime.
Meanwhile, Margaret and Jimmie were still arguing:
'Well, there's one thing, there'll be plenty of eggs tomorrow,' said Jimmie. 'There's nothing like an earthquake for making them lay.'
The next morning, Sunday, they went home. Emily was still so saturated in earthquake as to be dumb. She ate earthquake and slept earthquake: her fingers and legs were earthquake. With John it was ponies. The earthquake had been fun: but it was the ponies that mattered. But at present it did not worry Emily that she was alone in her sense of proportion. She was too completely possessed to be able to see anything, or realize that any one else pretended to even a self-delusive fiction of existence."
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