I puzzle about this for an instant, but soon forget to wonder; for when the Dream Fairy tells us tales we are only as little children, sitting round with open eyes, believing all, though marvelling that such things should be.
Each night, when all else in the house sleeps, the door of that room opens noiselessly, and the man enters and closes it behind him. Each night he draws away the white sheet, and takes the small dead body in his arms; and through the dark hours he paces softly to and fro, holding it close against his breast, kissing it and crooning to it, like a mother to her sleeping baby.
When the first ray of dawn peeps into the room, he lays the dead child back again, and smooths the sheet above her, and steals away.
And he succeeds and prospers in all things, and each day he grows richer and greater and more powerful.
CHAPTER III
We had much trouble with our heroine. Brown wanted her ugly. Brown’s chief ambition in life is to be original, and his method of obtaining the original is to take the unoriginal and turn it upside down.
If Brown were given a little planet of his own to do as he liked with, he would call day, night, and summer, winter. He would make all his men and women walk on their heads and shake hands with their feet, his trees would grow with their roots in the air, and the old cock would lay all the eggs while the hens sat on the fence and crowed. Then he would step back and say, “See what an original world I have created, entirely my own idea!”
There are many other people besides Brown whose notion of originality would seem to be precisely similar.
I know a little girl, the descendant of a long line of politicians. The hereditary instinct is so strongly developed in her that she is almost incapable of thinking for herself. Instead, she copies in everything her elder sister, who takes more after the mother. If her sister has two helpings of rice pudding for supper, then she has two helpings of rice pudding. If her sister isn’t hungry and doesn’t want any supper at all, then she goes to bed without any supper.
This lack of character in the child troubles her mother, who is not an admirer of the political virtues, and one evening, taking the little one on her lap, she talked seriously to her.