Unasked Questions

For a moment in time she walked into a memory, a scholar’s pale forehead and refined nose, pewter hair falling like a lion’s mane, stature lithe and sinewy as Mercury with a posture at once stately yet indifferently engaged. With agile, all-consuming catlike eyes that peered inside one’s head, he was a magnet to others.

Like a carillon of tiny bells, his laughter leapt out mercilessly as she climbed his Jacob’s ladder amid the clutter and clatter of his unfinished prodigies.

To pluck knowledge from a learned man’s brain, her cathedral to the worship of learning and life.

His mind, like lightning bolts, always on loftier matters to vast zeniths of thought, yet he made some expression that betrayed pleased surprise at her intellectual innocence.

But the faces and gestures of men had become books she could read at a glance. So, with a smile of goodness that could shame Seraphs, she knew, of her unasked questions, his best answer she would receive.