“I got back from the University late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out on the galley reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long twilight. And I saw Anne. I was sitting in the swing with Adam, when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she had been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girl wearing round-toed, black patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soap. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world but suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softnesses sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of her neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, 'Hello, Jack,' while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and knew that summer had come.”

“I believed, from the solitary and thoughtful way in which my mother murmured her song, that she was alone. And I went softly into the room. She was sitting by the fire, suckling an infant, whose tiny hand she held against her neck. Her eyes were looking down upon its face, and she sat singing to it. I was so far right, that she had no other companion. I spoke to her, and she started, and cried out. But seeing me, she called me her dear Davy, her own boy! and coming half across the room to meet me, kneeled down upon the ground and kissed me, and laid my head down on her bosom near the little creature that was nestling there, and put its hand up to my lips. I wish I had died. I wish I had died then, with that feeling in my Heart! I should have been more fit for Heaven than I ever have been since.”

“I saw her when I came back... Her eyes were closed and everything. I had to stop.I just watched her. It was very relaxing. I had to keep proper still. I had to be extra quiet or I'd ruin it. I didn't want it to stop. I could see her lips move but I couldn't hear the words. Sometimes she bent forward until her head was nearly on the ground. She made everything to proper slow. It made me sleepy from just watching it. I wanted to ask her what she was praying for but I swallowed the words back down again. ...you knew it had to be something good. I just watched from behind the wall. There was nobody else around. It was the best kind of quiet... When the head-tie girl finished praying she opened her eyes and stood up. I turned aroun sharp-sharp and went back down the corridor. I tried not to make a sound. I didn't want her to see me. I didn't want her to know I was there for if it ruined it. I waited until she was gone, then I came back to life. I held my breath when I went past the bit she was praying in. I walked around the outside so I didn't tread on it.”

“I leaned down and kissed her mouth. It tasted salty, like her tears. This time, not warmth, but electricity shot from my mouth to my toes. I could feel tingling in my fingertips. It was like shoving a pen into an electrical outlet, which Link had dared me to do when I was eight years old. She closed her eyes and pulled me into her, and for a minute, everything was perfect. She kissed me, her lips beneath mine, and I knew she had been waiting for me, maybe just as long as I have been waiting for her. But then, as quickly as she had opened herself up to me, she shut me out. Or more accurately, pushed me back.”

“She repeated what her mother had told me, that she had been moved when she heard me playing as she passed the house. She had seen me on the street a few times, too, and begun to worship me. She actually used that word: worship. It made me turn bright red. I mean, to be 'worshiped' by such a beautiful little doll of a girl! I don't think it was an absolute lie, though. I was in my thirties already, of course, and I could never be as beautiful and bright as she was, and I had no special talent, but I must have had something that drew her to me, something that was missing in her, I would guess. Which must have been what got her interested in my to begin with. I believe that now, looking back. And I'm not boasting.”

“White people were dangerous and snakes were dangerous and now the two were working together, each doing what the other told it to. She was sure she had seen a snake in a weeded ditch with the head of a white man. Right after she came out of the house on the way to Big Joe's, which she had immediately forgotten, she saw it, long and black and diamond-patterned in the ditch with a white man's head. It had blue eyes. The bluest eyes any white man ever had. She was sure she had seen it. She thought she had seen it. Maybe it was only a dream or a memory of another time. Whatever it was, she still saw it every time she closed her eyes, coiled there on the back of her eyelids, blue-eyed and dangerous.”