She ran off with a burst of laughter upon that face of polished onion skin, and left her uncle to reflect deeply upon this new world of beetles.
The lesson was instructive and symbolic, though the choice of subject was not as poetic as might have been. With this new classification as a starting-point, the child, no doubt, had erected a vast superstructure of wonder, fun, beauty, and—why not?—truth! For children, he mused, are ever the true idealists. In their games of make-believe they create the world anew—in six minutes. They scorn measurements, and deal directly with the eternal principles behind things. With a little mud on the end of a stick they trace the course of the angels, and with the wooden-blocks of their building-boxes they erect the towering palaces of a universe that shall never pass away.
Yet what they did, surely he also did! His world of imagination was identical with theirs of make-believe. Was, then, the difference between them one of expression merely?...
Toby came thundering up and fell upon him from nowhere.
‘Uncle Paul,’ she said rather breathlessly.
‘Yes, dear,’ he made answer, still thinking upon beedles and beeties.
‘On the path down there by the rosydandrums there’s a beedle now—a big one with horns—if you’d like to see it.’
‘Oh! By the rhododendrons, you mean?’
‘Yes, by the rosydandrums,’ she repeated. ‘Only we must be quick or he’ll get home before we come.’
He was far more keen to see that “beedle” than she was. Yet for the immediate safety of his soul he refused.