Alice Meynell.
‘That’s very pretty, I think,’ she said politely, staring at him, with a little smile, half puzzled. The music of the words had touched her, but she evidently did not grasp why he should have said it. She waited a minute to see if he had really finished, and then went on again with her own vein of thought.
‘Then please tell me, Uncle,’ she asked gravely, with deep earnestness, ‘what is it people lose when they grow up?’
And he answered her with equal gravity, speaking seriously as though the little body at his side were habited by an old, discriminating soul.
‘Simplicity, I think, principally—and vision,’ he said. ‘They get wise with so many little details called facts that they lose the great view.’
The child watched his face, trying to understand. After a pause she came back to her own thinking—the sphere where she felt sure of herself.
‘They never see things properly once they’re grown up,’ she said sadly. ‘They all walk into a fog, I believe, that hides all the things we know, and stuffs up their eyes and ears. Daddy called it the cotton-wool of age, you know. Oh, Uncle, I do hope,’ she cried with the sudden passion of the child, ‘I do hope I shall never, never get into that horrid fog. You haven’t, and I won’t, won’t, won’t!’ Her voice rose to a genuine cry. Then she added with a touch of child-wonder that followed quite naturally upon the outburst, ‘How did you ever stop yourself, I wonder!’
‘I lived with the fairies in the backwoods,’ he answered, laughing softly.
She stared at him with complete admiration in her blue eyes.
‘Then I shall grow up ’xactly like you,’ she said, ‘so that I can always get out of the cage just as you do, even if my body is big.’