"Can you count to a hundred?"
"I'll try," she said, and began to count and got to nineteen, then
stopped. I prompted her, and she went on to twenty-nine, and so on,
hesitating after each nine, until she reached fifty. "That's enough," I
said, "it's too hard to go the whole way; but now don't you begin to
understand what a hundred years means?"
She looked at me and then away, and her beautiful blue intelligent eyes
told me plainly that she did not, and that she felt baffled and
worried.
After an interval she pointed to the hedge. "Look at the leaves," she
said. "I could go and count a hundred leaves, couldn't I? Well, would
that be a hundred years?"
And no further could we get, since I could not make out just what the
question meant. At first it looked as if she thought of the leaves as
an illustration - or a symbol; and then that she had failed to grasp the
idea of time, or that it had slipped from her, and she had fallen back,
as it were, to the notion that a hundred meant a hundred objects, which
you could see and feel. There appeared to be no way out of the puzzle-
dom into which we had both got, so that it came as a relief to both of
us when she heard her mother calling - calling her back into a world she
could understand.
