In after years when more serious work held him close to his study, and he made a point of declining all invitations, he took care that no small girl should be put on his black list. “If,” says Miss Hatch, “you were very anxious to get him to come to your house on any particular day, the only chance was not to invite him, but only to inform him that you would be at home; otherwise he would say ‘As you have invited me, I cannot come, for I have made a rule to decline all invitations, but I will come the next day,’” and in answer to an invitation to tea, he wrote her in his whimsical way:
“What an awful proposition! To drink tea from four to six would tax the constitution even of a hardened tea-drinker. For me, who hardly ever touches it, it would probably be fatal.”
If only we could read half the clever letters which passed between Lewis Carroll and his girl friends, what a volume of wit and humor, of sound common sense, of clever nonsense we should find! Yet behind it all, that underlying seriousness which made his friendship so precious to those who were so fortunate as to possess it. The “little girl” whose loving picture of him tells us so much lived near him all her life; she felt his influence in all the little things that go to make up a child’s day, long after the real childhood had passed her by. And so with all the girls who knew and loved him, and even those to whom his name was but a suggestion of what he really was.
Surely this fairy ring of girls encircles the English-speaking world, the girls whom Lewis Carroll loved, the hundreds he knew, the millions he had never seen.
CHAPTER XIII.
“ALICE” ON THE STAGE AND OFF.
hen the question of dramatizing the “Alice” books was placed before the author, by Mr. Savile Clarke, who was to undertake the work, he consented gladly enough. It was to be an operetta of two acts; the libretto, or story part, by Mr. Clarke himself, the music by Mr. Walter Slaughter, and the only condition Lewis Carroll made was that nothing should be written or acted which should in any way be unsuitable for children.