Childhood quickly fleets away. Those happy, unhappy, far-away days seem like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and darting over my garden stream, though at the actual time they more closely resembled, perhaps, a continuous dream broken into bits of vivid awakening.
As I grew older, my skirts grew longer, my desire for independence sharper, and my wits more inquiring. On my seventeenth birthday I put up my hair, and was confirmed by a bishop whom my godmother persuaded to officiate in the house. It was a solemn occasion; but my mother was a good deal concerned about the lunch, and I with the ballooning lawn sleeves and the two square episcopal finger-tips disposed upon my head. The experience cast a peaceful light into my mind and shook my heart, but it made me for a time a little self-conscious of both my virtue and my sins. I began to brood not only on the deplorable state of my own soul, but also on Pollie's and Mrs Ballard's, and became for a time a diminutive Miss Fenne. I suppose innocence is a precarious bliss. On the other hand, if one's mind is like a dead mole's belly, it is wise, I think, to examine it closely but not too often, and to repeat that confirmation for one's self every morning and evening.
As a young child I had been, of course, as naturally religious as a savage or an angel. But even then, I think, I never could quite believe that Paradise was a mere Fenne-land.
Once I remember in the midst of my multiplication table I had broken out unannounced with, "Then God made the world, mamma?"
"Yes, my dear."
"And all things in the forests and the birds in the sky and—and moles, and this?" I held down my limp, coral-coloured arithmetic.
"Yes," said she.
I wondered a while, losing myself, as if in wanderings like Ariel's, between the clouds. "What, mamma, did He make them of?" my voice interrupted me.
"He made them," said my mother steadily, "of His Power and Love."
Rapidly I slid back into her company. "And can we, can I, make things of my power and love?"