First sign of the flirting instinct which shows
itself as early as the maternal one. This, we know, appears as soon as
a child is able to stand on its feet, perhaps even before it quits the
cradle. It seeks to gratify itself by mothering something, even an
inanimate something, so that it is as common to put a doll in a baby-
child's hands as it is to put a polished cylindrical bit of ivory - I
forget the name of it - in its mouth. 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. And if I were to repeat to her now
the words she spoke (the very thought of Byron in his know-that-
whatever-thou-hast-been-'Twere-something-better-not-to-be poem) she
would not believe it.
It is, however, rare for the child mind in its first essays at
reflection to take so far a flight. It begins as a rule like the
fledgling by climbing with difficulty out of the nest and on to the
nearest branches.
It is interesting to observe these first movements. Quite recently I
met with a child of about the same age as the one just described, who
exhibited herself to me in the very act of trying to climb out of the
nest - trying to grasp something with her claws, so to speak, and pull
herself up. She was and is a very beautiful child, full of life and fun
and laughter, and came out to me when I was sitting on the lawn to ask
me for a story.
"Very well," I said. "But you must wait for half an hour until I
remember all about it before I begin. It is a long story about things
that happened a long time ago."
She waited as patiently as she could for about three minutes, and then
said: "What do you mean by a long time ago?"
I explained, but could see that I had not made her understand, and at
last put it in days, then weeks, then seasons, then years, until she
appeared to grasp the meaning of a year, and then finished by saying a
long time ago in this case meant a hundred years.
Again she was at a loss, but still trying to understand she asked me:
"What is a hundred years?"
"Why, it's a hundred years," I replied. "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.
I believe that when we penetrate to the real mind of girl children we
find a strong likeness in them even when they appear to differ as
widely from one another as adults do. The difference in the little ones
is less in disposition and character than in unlikeness due to
unconscious imitation. They take their mental colour from their
surroundings. The red men of America are the gravest people on the
globe, and their children are like them when with them; but this
unnatural gravity is on the surface and is a mask which drops or fades
off when they assemble together out of sight and hearing of their
elders.
