“How do you send letters to your people?”
The yearning eyes became grave. “Well, that is awkward. I leave them in queer little places where big, bad, real people are not apt to find them—at the root of a flower, in the crevice of a wall, or under a stone—and persuade myself that somehow they reach their destination. Sometimes I carry them clear to the woods and leave them in hollow trees, or under great, cool rocks, where, perhaps, there are fairies or some kind of invisible messengers who will transport them for me.
“But when it rains, now and then, they are washed out of their places, and I find them all wet and blurred. Then a chilly feeling comes over me, and I am half afraid that, after all, my people have not seen them. You see it hurts me if I think nobody reads them. That’s why I wanted you to read my letter to Helen. I felt sure you would understand.”
“You have many of these unseen friends of yours?” asked the stranger.
“Yes, many; but Helen is my only confidante. Of course I am not a little girl when I am with my people. I am grown up, and am important, for I, too, am a famous writer, and I paint the most wonderful pictures. Yes, I have great fame and the wisest and most distinguished people are pleased to be received by me, and they—well,—they hang upon my words.”
“Of course,” said the stranger.
“It is beautiful,” continued the child, “to be treated with consideration. When will big folks learn that little ones are human beings like themselves, with the same feelings exactly, and that they can’t respect themselves if they are ordered about rudely, scolded, snubbed and generally treated as inferior beings?”
She was enjoying the first appreciation the world had accorded her; was breathing the air of her dreams, the congenial atmosphere which is only found where there are sympathetic souls to breathe it with us.
The stranger, understanding, thought of “how widely yawns the moat that girds a human soul,” whose “real world is always an invisible place, removed from the rush and chatter of crowds, for the most important portion of life is the secret and solitary portion.”
“Are your people all women, or do you permit poor, imperfect, earthly man to enter your paradise?” he asked.