To talk with her cleared his own mind, too, in a way it had never been cleared before. He came to understand himself better, and in so doing swept away a great deal of accumulated rubbish; for he found that when his thought was too confused to make clear to her, it was usually false, wrong—not real.
‘I can’t make that out,’ she would say, with a troubled face. ‘I suppose, I’m not old enough yet.’ And afterwards Paul would realise that it was himself who was at fault, not the child. Her instinct was unerring; whereas he, with those years of solitude behind him, sometimes lost himself in a region where imagination, self-devouring, ran the risk of becoming untrue, possibly morbid. Her wholesome little judgments brought sanity and laughter.
For, like other mystical temperaments, what he sought, presumably, was escape from himself, yet not—and herein he differed healthily from most of his kidney—so much from his Real Inner Self, as from its outer pettiness and limitations. True, he sought union with something larger and more perfect, and in so far was a mystic; but this larger ‘something,’ he dimly understood, was the star of his own soul not yet emancipated, and in so far he remained a man of action. His was the true, wholesome mysticism; hysteria was not—as with most—its chief ingredient. Moreover, this other, eternal part of him touched Eternity. To be identified with it meant to be identified with God, but never for one instant to lose his own individuality.
And to express himself through the creative imagination, to lose his own smallness by interpreting beauty, he had always felt must be a half-way house to the end in view. His inability, therefore, to find such means of expression had always meant something incalculably grave, something that hindered growth. But now this child Nixie, in some extraordinary yet utterly simple fashion, had come to show him the way. It was wonderful past finding out. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. Yet, there she was, ever by his side, pointing to ways that led him out into expression.
No woman could have done it. His two longings, he came to realise, were actually one: the desire to express his yearnings grew out of the desire to find God.
And so it was that the thought of her growing up was horrid to him. He could not bear to think of her as a ‘young woman’ moving in a modern world where she would lose all touch with the elemental forces of vision and simplicity whence she drew half her grace and wonder. Already for him, in some mystical fashion of spiritual alchemy, she had become the eternal feminine, exquisitely focused in the little child. With the advance of years this must inevitably pass from her, as she increased the distance from her source of inspiration.
‘Nixie, you must promise never to grow up,’ he would say, laughing.
‘Because Aventures stop then, don’t they?’ she asked.
‘Partly that,’ he answered.
‘And I should get tired, like mother; or stupid, like the head gardener,’ she added. ‘I know. But I don’t think I ever shall, somehow. I think I am meant to be always like this.’