The air was full of scent from wet leaves, alive with the song of birds thanking the sky.

Suddenly he felt her arm round his ribs; either it or they--which, he could not at the moment tell--seemed extraordinarily soft....
Between Felix and his young daughter, Nedda, there existed the only kind of love, except a mother's, which has much permanence--love based on mutual admiration.

Though why Nedda, with her starry innocence, should admire him, Felix could never understand, not realizing that she read his books, and even analyzed them for herself in the diary which she kept religiously, writing it when she ought to have been asleep.

He had therefore no knowledge of the way his written thoughts stimulated the ceaseless questioning that was always going on within her; the thirst to know why this was and that was not.

Why, for instance, her heart ached so some days and felt light and eager other days?
Why, when people wrote and talked of God, they seemed to know what He was, and she never did?
Why people had to suffer; and the world be black to so many millions?
Why one could not love more than one man at a time?
Why--a thousand things?
Felix's books supplied no answers to these questions, but they were comforting; for her real need as yet was not for answers, but ever for more questions, as a young bird's need is for opening its beak without quite knowing what is coming out or going in.