Page:I, Mary MacLane (1917).pdf/119

 absolute. And it echoes, echoes, echoes in the market-place full-tongued, ringing, rising like the northern gale when all the other voices are long dead-silenced: and after.

Music of the world.

This moment I hear it for it is half-after two of a bright gold day. The air is emotional, nectareal, and mellow and yellow and hot-sparkling. The Voices pierce it like a storm of fine steel arrows. I at once set open my spirit-door and through it come the sweet shrill chorus and the marvel echo beginning and swelling and starting away. It wakes vision so that I see—quick, evil, terribly human, in the dazzlingest daytime colors—all those Places where the Voices go.

I go to a window and watch the children running about beneath the high tide of their Voices. And they and the school-building and the streets and stone walls show in duller colors than the Places where their Echo goes.

—small girls with clipped hair and bloused cotton frocks, taller girls throwing a basket-ball, thin-legged little girls playing hop-scotch, groups of varied sizes with rainbow ribbons in their hair, confused masses of knitted sweaters and fat white-stockinged legs and shiny leather belts and ankle-strapped shoes, and little young shoulders and knees