"She must be a strange little girl," she remarked, quietly.
"Yes," said Mrs. Caryll, "so strange that, as I said, I really think sometimes there is something wanting in her nature."
"Or unawakened," said Magdalen. "I don't pretend to understand children well—you know I was an only child—but still a little child's nature cannot be very easy to understand at the best of times. It must be so folded up, as it were, like a little half-opened bud. And then children's power of expressing themselves is so small—they must often feel themselves misunderstood and yet not know how to say even that. And oh, dear, what a puzzle life and the world and everything must seem to them!"
"Not to them only, my dear Magdalen," said Mr. Caryll, drily.
"And," said Mrs. Caryll, "it really isn't always the case that children are difficult to understand. None of ours are but Hoodie. There's Maudie now—she has always been a delicious child, and the little boys are very nice, except when Hoodie upsets them. But for her, as she is constantly told, there never would be the least ruffle in the nursery."
"But does it do any good to tell her so?" said Miss King.
Hoodie's mother smiled,
"My dear Magdalen," she said, "wait till you see her. What would do her any good no one as yet has found out. She is just the most contradictory, queer-tempered, troublesome child that ever was known."
"Poor little girl," said Maudie's godmother, thinking to herself that a little dog with such a very bad name as Hoodie was really not to be envied. She loved her own god-daughter Maudie dearly, and she knew it to be true that she was a very nice child, but her heart was sore for poor cantankerous Hoodie. You see her patience had not yet been tried by her as had been the patience of all those about the little girl, so after all she could not consider herself a fair judge.
And her first introduction to the small black sheep of the nursery did not, it must be confessed, tend to prove that Hoodie's doings and misdoings were exaggerated.