Time
pooled like honey.
"Why
are there so many chambers?"
"What?"
Violet turned, raised her brows, took
up her skirts and went to her pupils.
They
were standing over the specimen. The
bench was spattered and stained.
Nicked frequently, charred intermittently.
The light from high bare windows was
adequate.
"Why
are there so many chambers?"
Incontestable.
"In
hearts?"
The
young women laughed.
"There
are so many rooms. Why are there so many?"
"Chamfered
is the word, and what it can mean, and what it does mean---" Violet
went on to tell them and she told it like a
magical tale, like a challenge to mystery,
an adventure irresistible for
any right-thinking female with the sense and
discrimination not foreign to the human species but
not ubiquitous either.
And
while she told them she illumined far clefts,
secret boxes, deep pockets within her
where lay sleeping and precious certain
memories.
Broad
fields, brilliant butterflies, both were sunned,
fertile, treasured, chamfered.
Costumes
were; she had seen a chamfered weskit covering
a matchless breast.
Not the form,
no, not the form, this time, but
the content. What the breast contained, what
the heart possessed.
It
was silly, in actuality.
Violet
went quietly to the row of windows and looked out upon the rooftops.
The heart was not the seat of anything except
blood. Whence sprang courage, compassion, intuition,
passion, why, to attempt
that encompassment was foolhardy and impossible.
Is that why only the young inquired and
the old possessed such eyes?