Richard fumbled with something very badly folded up in newspaper. He also tried ineffectively to light a match by wiping it helplessly against his riding breeches. He seemed to have none of the small skill in details that comes to most people before they grow up. He did everything as if he were doing it for the first time.
"I had nothing but the _Morning Post_ to wrap it in," he murmured. "I'm afraid that may have spoilt the magic a little."
It was the dragon finally who produced the necessary light. After watching Richard with the anxious sympathy of one ineffectual for another, it said: "Let me," and kindly breathed out a little flame, which set the packet aflare for a moment.
The ashes fluttered down from Richard's hand among the beans, and a thin violet stalk of smoke went up.
Sarah Brown smelt the unmistakable sour smell of magic, and saw soundless words moving Richard's little khaki moustache. Then she found that she had disappeared.
She had never done this before, she had always been present to disturb and interrupt herself. She had never seen the world before, except through the little glazed peepholes, called eyes, through which her everyday self rather wistfully believed that it could see. Now, of course, she knew what seeing was, and for the first time she was aware of the real sizes of things. Poor man measures all things by the size of his own foot. He looks complacently at the print of his boot in the mud, and notices that the ant which he crushed was not nearly as big as his foot, therefore the ant does not matter to him. He also notices that those same feet of his would not be able to walk to the moon within a reasonable time, therefore the moon does not matter to him.
But Sarah Brown had disappeared, and therefore could not measure anything. The spider strode from hill to hill, with the wind rushing through the hair on his back. The blue sky was just a lampshade, clipped on to the earth to shield it from the glare of the gods, beyond it was a mere roof of eternity, pricked with a few billion stars to keep it well ventilated.
Sarah Brown had for a while all the fun of being a god. She was nowhere and she was everywhere. She could have counted the hairs on David's head. The world waved like a flower upon a thin purple stalk of smoke....