“How do you know I think like a child? I may act like one. And a very bad one, too, sometimes! I don’t deny that. But my thoughts—well, they are my own! I’d be willing sometimes to have them child-thoughts.” She sighed ponderously. “Hm! I have some pretty grown-up thoughts—and worries, times, when I’m all alone.”
“I intended to say, Wanza girl, that you have a young soul—students of Oriental literature tell us that some souls are younger than others.”
She looked at me, frowned, bit her lip and then said dryly: “Do they know more about it than we do?”
“I think so, child.”
“Oh, all right—I don’t care! So long as I know I’ve got a soul it’s enough for me.”
“There are people—do you know it, little girl?—who doubt the existence of the soul.”
“What?”
Wanza turned on me so quickly that she almost lost her balance on the piazza railing. I repeated my remark.
“They don’t believe—they don’t belie—why, David Dale, how dare you sit there and tell me such stuff as that!”
“I am speaking the truth, girl.”