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 "She had," Dare agreed. "If Katie was a savant she might have developed it into an epoch-making theory of time."

"How far ahead would that have got her?"

"Not an inch. Metaphysicians are higher in the air, and their altitude gives them a more panoramic view, but they are traveling towards eternity at exactly the same speed as Katie and not a whit faster. The value of intricate theories is that they are reducible to homely, concrete observations like Katie's. Conversely the beauty of Katie's homely discovery is that it can be elevated into a formula and re-applied, even canonized, along with Newton's apple and adventures of other scientific saints. It's like art: the glory of music is that it is made up of vulgar sounds, and the saving grace of vulgar sounds is that they can all get to a musical heaven."

Louise was sitting on the grass, gazing down towards grey plains which merged into the distant brown hills, which in turn merged into a sky whose blue gave an impression of actual depth. It was not a canopy to-day but an ocean of air, or rather,—since it was bodiless and unglazed,—an ocean's ghost, with small clouds, like the ghosts of icebergs, drifting across its waveless surface.

The breeze which tossed the branches and stirred Sundown's mane came to sport with her own hair. Her hat lay at her feet, and with an arm limply outstretched she wielded a switch, flicking the dusty toes of her riding boots.