"You're always going it. Though you
seem so still--you're turning furiously like a little planet!"
For this abruptly struck him, flashing the symbol into his
imagination--that Maria lived so close to the universe that her life
and movements were akin to those of the heavenly bodies. He saw her as
an epitome of the earth. Fat, peaceful, little, calm, rotund Maria--a
miniature earth! She had no call to hurry nor rush after things. Like
the earth she contained all things within herself. It made him smile;
he smiled as he looked down into her face; she smiled as she rolled
her blue eyes upwards into his.
Yet her calm was not the calm of sloth. In that mysterious centre
where she lived he felt her as tremendously alive.
For the earth, apparently so calm and steady, knows no pause. She
moves round her axis without stopping. She rushes with immense
rapidity round the sun. Simultaneously with these two movements she
combines a third; the sun, carrying her and all his other planets with
him, hurries at a prodigious rate through interstellar space,
adventuring new regions never seen before. Calm outwardly, and without
apparent motion, the earth--at this very moment, as he leaned across
the window-sill--was making these three gigantic, endless movements.
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