“Good-bye,” grinned the wooden man, mockingly. “Close the door after you as you go out.”
“That was a very rude wooden man,” thought Alice to herself, as, half blinded with tears, she hurried through the snowy streets. “It is very evident that he tore off his thirteenth year. That is the year when people learn to be polite. And he said I was not real! I never knew till I was thirteen how real I was.”
Without quite knowing where she was going, unconsciously her footsteps strayed toward the shop of the old bookman, the only friend she had found who seemed to be genuine. The precious volume, which once she had thought a prison, was safe beneath her arm. Well, she knew now what she would do. She would give it back, and if the old man were so kind as to let her, she would creep back into the pages, and be happy there again forever....
“Poor child,” smiled the old bookman, when she had related her adventures, and cried over them. “Indeed he did need his thirteenth year. That is the age at which one best appreciates what reality is. Once learned, it is a lesson never to be forgotten. To the child of thirteen, all things are real if they are beautiful, and all things are unreal which are ugly. Anything is real that we want to be real. Sensible writers, like Barrie, learn this at thirteen and tear off all the remaining years of the calendar. Time passes, but they remain thirteen; they improve their style, their appreciation of beautiful things deepens, their outlook is broader and finer, but at heart they are still children. They have never escaped from their thirteenth year, and they never will—and they are very glad about it.”
To this astonishing harangue, Alice had no reply, for truth to tell she understood very little of it; but it sounded real, and she liked the look on the old bookman’s face as he said it.
“Would you mind, sir,” she timidly asked, “if I were to creep back into my book, and hide again on your shelf?”
“Are you quite sure you can manage it?” asked the old man.
“Oh, yes,” said Alice, “for I still have a piece of cake that I brought with me. I had two pieces—one to make me grow, and one to make me small again. Just watch me!”
Then she took a few crumbs of cake from her pocket and began to eat them; and the old bookman standing by, saw her shrink down and down and down, until she was such a tiny little thing at his feet that his eyes could barely find her.