The Child Grows Up Nursing This
Image Of Itself, Whether With Or Without A Wax Face, Blue Eyes And Tow-
Coloured hair, and if or when the unreality of the doll begins to spoil
its pleasure, it will start mothering
Something with life in it - a
kitten for preference, and if no kitten, or puppy or other such
creature easy to be handled or cuddled, is at hand, it will take kindly
to any mild-mannered old gentleman of its circle.
It is just these first instinctive impulses of the girl-child, combined
with her imitativeness and wonderful precocity, which make her so
fascinating. But do they think? They do, but this first early thinking
does not make them self-conscious as does their later thinking, to the
spoiling of their charm. The thinking indeed begins remarkably early. I
remember one child, a little five-year-old and one of my favourites,
climbing to my knee one day and exhibiting a strangely grave face.
"Doris, what makes you look so serious?" I asked. And after a few
moments of silence, during which she appeared to be thinking hard, she
startled me by asking me what was the use of living, and other
questions which it almost frightened me to hear from those childish
innocent lips. Yet I have seen this child grow up to womanhood - a quite
commonplace conventional woman, who when she has a child of her own of
five would be unspeakably shocked to hear from it the very things she
herself spoke at that tender age.
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