You'll be glad

Seymour was standing on the curb edge before it, facing us, balanced on his arches, his hands in the slash pockets of his sheep-lined coat.  With the canopy lights behind him, his face was shadowed, dimmed out.  He was ten. From the way he was balanced on the curb edge, from the position of his hands, from -- well, the quantity x itself, I knew as well then as I know now that he was immensely conscious himself of the magic hour of the day. "Could you try not aiming so much?" he asked me, still standing there. "If you hit him when you aim, it'll just be luck." He was speaking, communicating, and yet not breaking the spell. I then broke it. Quite deliberately. "How can it be luck if I aim?" I said back to him, not loud (despite the italics) but with rather more irritation in my voice than I was actually feeling. He didn't say anything for a moment but simply stood balanced on the curb, looking at me, I knew imperfectly, with love. "Because it will be," he said. "You'll be glad if you hit his marble -- Ira's marble -- won't you? Won't you be glad? And if you're glad when you hit somebody's marble, then you sort of secretly didn't expect too much to do it.  So there'd have to be some luck in it, there'd have to be slightly quite a lot of accident in it." He stepped down off the curb, his hands still in the slash pockets of his coat, and came over to us.  But a thinking Seymour didn't cross a twilit street quickly, or surely didn't seem to. In that light, he came toward us much like a sailboat.  Pride, on the other hand, is one of the fastest-moving things in this world, and before he got within five feet of us, I said hurriedly to Ira, "It's getting dark anyway," effectively breaking up the game.  - from Seymour - An Introduction by J.D. Salinger