Little, Big by John Crowley Page B

and Henry Cloud's she looked out toward the hills and yes, white cumulus had begun to assemble itself that way, climbing like imminent victory, and no doubt Sophie was right. She lay and thought: At least he came all right, and contradicted none of it. Beyond that she couldn't tell.
    Just then where the Old Stone Fence divides the Green Meadow from the Old Pasture which goes down rocky and leaping with insects to the margin of the Lily Pond, Doctor Drinkwater in a wide-awake hat stopped, panting from his climb; slowly the roar of his own blood diminished in his ears and he could begin to listen to the scene in progress of his only drama, the interminable conversations of birds, cicada's semitune, the rustle and thump of a thousand creatures' entrances and exits. The land was touched by the hand of man, though that hand was in these days mostly withdrawn; way down beyond the Lily Pond he could see the dreaming roof of Brown's barn, and knew this to be an abandoned pasture of his enterprise, and this wall his ancient marker. The scene was variegated by man's enterprise, and room made for many houses large and small, this capacious wall, that sunny pasture, that pond. It all seemed to the Doctor just what was truly meant by the word "ecology," which he saw now and then misused in the dense columns that bordered his chronicles of this place in the City paper; and as he sat on a warm lichened stone utterly attentive, a Little Breeze brought him news that by evening a mountain of cloud would break in pieces here.
    Just then in Sophie's room on the wide featherbed where for many years John Drinkwater lay with Violet Bramble, their two great-grandchildren lay. The long pale dress that next day Daily Alice would put on, and then presumably not again ever completely put off, was hung carefully from the top of the closet door, and made in the closet door mirror another like it, which it pressed back to back; and below it and around it were all things proper to it. Sophie and her sister lay naked in the afternoon heat; Sophie brushed her hand across her sister's sweat-damp flank, and Daily Alice said "Ah, it's too hot," and felt hotter still her sister's tears on her shoulder. She said: "Someday soon it'll be you, you'll choose or maybe be chosen, and you'll be another June bride," and Sophie said, "I'll never, never," and more that Alice couldn't hear because Sophie buried her face against her sister's neck and murmured like the afternoon; what Sophie said was, "He'll never understand or see, they'll never give him what they gave us, he'll step in the wrong places and look when he should look away, never see doors or know turnings; wait and see, you just wait and see"; which just then Great-aunt Cloud was pondering, what they would see if they waited, and what their mother also felt though not with the same plain curiosity but a sort of maneuvering within of the armies of Possibility; and what Smoky too, left alone for what he imagined was the general Sunday siesta, day of rest, in the black and dusty library with the whole plan before him, just then trembled with, sleepless and erect as a flame.

III.
    There was an old woman
    Who lived under the hill
    And if she's not gone
    She lives there still.
    It was during a glad summer toward the end of the last century that John Drinkwater, while on a walking tour of England ostensibly to look at houses, came one twilight to the gates of a red-brick vicarage in Cheshire. He had lost his way, and his guidebook, which he had foolishly knocked into the millrace by which he had eaten his lunch hours before; he was hungry, and however safe and sweet the English countryside he couldn't help feeling uneasy.

Strange  Insides
    In the vicarage garden, an unkempt and riotous garden, moths glimmered amid a dense cascade of rosebushes, and birds flitted and rustled in a gnarled and domineering apple tree. In the tree's crook someone sat and, as he looked, lit a candle. A candle? It was a young girl in