"I'm So Glad To See You," It Said, "I Was Beginning To Fear You Had Gone Away.

And now how unfortunate that you see me with my people and we cannot speak!

They wouldn't understand. How could they, since they don't belong to our world and know what we know? If I were to explain that we are different from them, that we want to play together on the beach and watch the waves and paddle and build castles, they would say, 'Oh yes, that's all very well, but - ' I shouldn't know what they meant by that, should you? I do hope we'll meet again some day and stand once more hand in hand on the beach - don't you?"

And with that she passed on and was gone, and I saw her no more. Perhaps that glance which said so much had been observed, and she had been hurriedly removed to some place of safety at a great distance. But though I never saw her again, never again stood hand in hand with her on the beach and never shall, I have her picture to keep in all its flowery freshness and beauty, the most delicate and lovely perhaps of all the pictures I possess of the little girls I have met.

XX

DIMPLES

It is not pleasant when you have had your say, made your point to your own satisfaction, and gone cheerfully on to some fresh subject, to be assailed with the suspicion that your interlocutor is saying mentally: All very well - very pretty talk, no doubt, but you haven't convinced me, and I even doubt that you have succeeded in convincing yourself!

For example, a reader of the foregoing notes may say: "If you really find all this beauty and charm and fascination you tell us in some little girls, you must love them. You can't admire and take delight in them as you can in a piece of furniture, or tapestry, or a picture or statue or a stone of great brilliancy and purity of colour, or in any beautiful inanimate object, without that emotion coming in to make itself part of and one with your admiration. You can't, simply because a child is a human being, and we do not want to lose sight of the being we love. So long as the love lasts, the eye would follow its steps because - we are what we are, and a mere image in the mind doesn't satisfy the heart. Love is never satisfied, and asks not for less and less each day but for more - always for more. Then, too, love is credulous; it believes and imagines all things and, like all emotions, it pushes reason and experience aside and sticks to the belief that these beautiful qualities cannot die and leave nothing behind: they are not on the surface only; they have their sweet permanent roots in the very heart and centre of being."

That, I suppose, is the best argument on the other side, and if you look straight at it for six seconds, you will see it dissolve like a lump of sugar in a tumbler of water and disappear under your very eyes. For the fact remains that when I listen to the receding footsteps of my little charmer, the sigh that escapes me expresses something of relief as well as regret.

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