She was a fairy—a wood-nymph. She would be invisible for ever to all mortals, save those few who have minds to believe, eyes to see. To these she is ever present, the spirit of Nature—a sprite of the meadow, a naiad of lakes, a nymph of the woods.
HISTORICAL NOTE
(By Another Hand)
In the opening week of January, 1923, there appeared on the outside of a certain door within a dingy, sunless, and cramped apartment a slip of paper bearing the following typewritten notice:
Nobody may come into this room if the door is shut tight (if it is shut not quite latched it is all right) without knocking. The person in the room if he agrees that one shall come in will say “come in,” or something like that and if he does not agree to it he will say “Not yet, please,” or something like that. The door may be shut if nobody is in the room but if a person wants to come in, knocks and hears no answer that means that there is no one in the room and he must not go in.
Reason. If the door is shut tight and a person is in the room the shut door means that the person in the room wishes to be left alone. The author of this odd manifesto (here reproduced with strict textual exactitude from the frayed original) was the author of the foregoing story, then just three months short of nine years old. The door on which it appeared was that of the room in which, on a small typewriter, she wrote down the adventures of Eepersip; and the week in which it appeared was that in which these adventures had their beginning.
She finished them, in the same room, three months later, early in the March of her ninth completed year and a few days after her birthday. One of her curious, slightly un-American inventions, I must here explain, was the concept of her own birthday as an annual occasion for handing out things to the other members of her family. She planned this story from the beginning as a gift for her mother on March 4. Would her mother “like” it, though? On that point there would have to be a disinterested opinion—as it happened, mine. With intense secrecy, behind the latched door of that room guarded by the constrained preparatory notice, she read me the instalments as they were produced.
My candid guess was that her mother would indeed “like” it. I liked it myself, if only as unconscious expression of a radiant physical vitality— so much I found in it of the mighty swimmer, the enjoyable young comrade of trail and river, always ready to swing a paddle tirelessly or carry ungrumbling a full fair share of pack. I liked it, too, as her answer to the one year which she had ever been called upon to spend in undeniably tawdry surroundings. But, alas, there came interruptions one of them in the shape of the only appreciable illness she has ever had—and these pulled down her average daily output. On her big days the small typist clicked off fresh copy to the extent of from four to five thousand words; but still the appointed morning caught her some pages short of the end. The tale came to Finis a few days later. Its length, in that first incarnation, was some 40,000 words, or not far from what it is now.
Up to that point there had been, of course, no thought of print. It was I who introduced the question of print; and it had at that time no connection whatever with publication. The author of the story never had (and never has) experienced any school system, public or private, her education having been exclusively the home-made one devised by her mother; and I was beginning to think it high time that print became a part of it. It was, in fine, my idea that we ought to have a piece of her work put into type in some small shop where she could set part of it herself, pull her own proofs, learn more about proof-reading by correcting them, and see the whole thing through to the binding of a small armful of copies for her friends.
But before anything of that sort was done I wanted her to have the practice of revising her first copy as carefully as possible and putting it into strictly printable condition—as, indeed, she was eager to do. Accordingly she took it away with her in the summer, worked on it from early July through September in the intervals of swimming, canoeing, mountain-climbing, and plain day-dreaming, and brought it back, on the 5th of October, 1923, ready for print. Twenty-four hours later we left it in a burning building from which nothing got out but the lucky human occupants.