“Do you collect insects?” said that philosopher, as much surprised as it was his nature to be at anything.
“Only butterflies,” answered Lily; “they are not insects, you know; they are souls.”
“Emblems of souls you mean,—at least, so the Greeks prettily represented them to be.”
“No, real souls,—the souls of infants that die in their cradles unbaptized; and if they are taken care of, and not eaten by birds, and live a year then they pass into fairies.”
“It is a very poetical idea, Miss Mordaunt, and founded on evidence quite as rational as other assertions of the metamorphosis of one creature into another. Perhaps you can do what the philosophers cannot,—tell me how you learned a new idea to be an incontestable fact?”
“I don’t know,” replied Lily, looking very much puzzled; “perhaps I learned it in a book, or perhaps I dreamed it.”
“You could not make a wiser answer if you were a philosopher. But you talk of taking care of butterflies; how do you do that? Do you impale them on pins stuck into a glass case?”
“Impale them! How can you talk so cruelly? You deserve to be pinched by the fairies.”
“I am afraid,” thought Kenelm, compassionately, “that my companion has no mind to be formed; what is euphoniously called ‘an innocent.’”
He shook his head and remained silent. Lily resumed,—