"Perhaps We Shall Meet Again." Those Last Five Words!
If She Had Been Some Great Lady, An Invalid In A
Bath-chair, who had
conversed for half an hour with a perfect stranger and had wished to
express the pleasure
And interest she had had in the colloquy, she
could not have said more, nor less, nor said it more graciously, more
beautifully.
But we did not meet again, for when I looked for her she was not there:
she had gone out of my life, like Priscilla, and like so many beautiful
things that vanish and return not.
And now I return to what I said at the beginning - that there were
several reasons for including this little girl in my series of
impressions. The most important one has been left until now. I want to
meet her again, but how shall I find her in this immensity of London -
these six millions of human souls! Let me beg of any reader who knows
Rose Mary Angela Catherine Maude Caversham - a name like that - who has
identified her from my description - that he will inform me of her
whereabouts.
XXIII
A SPRAY OF SOUTHERNWOOD
To pass from little girls to little boys is to go into quite another,
an inferior, coarser world. No doubt there are wonderful little boys,
but as a rule their wonderfulness consists in a precocious intellect:
this kind doesn't appeal to me, so that if I were to say anything on
the matter, it would be a prejudiced judgment. Even the ordinary
civilised little boy, the nice little gentleman who is as much at home
in the drawing-room as at his desk in the school-room or with a bat in
the playing-field - even that harmless little person seems somehow
unnatural, or denaturalised to my primitive taste. A result, I will
have it, of improper treatment. He has been under the tap, too
thoroughly scrubbed, boiled, strained and served up with melted butter
and a sprig of parsley for ornament in a gilt-edged dish. I prefer him
raw, and would rather have the street-Arab, if in town, and the
unkempt, rough and tough cottage boy in the country. But take them
civilised or natural, those who love and observe little children no
more expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of the girl-child
which I have endeavoured to describe in the boy, than they would expect
the music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace and beauty of the
grey wagtail in Philip Sparrow. And yet, incredible as it seems, that
very quality of the miraculous little girl is sometimes found in the
boy and, with it, strange to say, the boy's proper mind and spirit. The
child lover will meet with one of that kind once in ten years, or not
so often - not oftener than a collector of butterflies will meet with a
Camberwell Beauty. The miraculous little girl, we know, is not more
uncommon than the Painted Lady, or White Admiral.
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