Perhaps some reader who does not know a little girl her psychology, after that account of the Alvediston maidie who presented me with a flower with an arch expression on her face just bordering on a mocking smile, will say, "What a sophisticated child to be sure!" He would be quite wrong unless we can say that the female child is born sophisticated, which sounds rather like a contradiction in terms. That appearance of sophistication, common in little girls even in a remote rustic village hidden away among the Wiltshire downs, is implicit in, and a quality of the child's mind—the female child, it will be understood—and is the first sign of the flirting instinct which shows itself as early as the maternal one. This, we know, appears as soon as a child is able to stand on its feet, perhaps even before it quits the cradle. It seeks to gratify itself by mothering something, even an inanimate something, so that it is as common to put a doll in a baby-child's hands as it is to put a polished cylindrical bit of ivory—I forget the name of it—in its mouth. The child grows up nursing this image of itself, whether with or without a wax face, blue eyes and tow-coloured hair, and if or when the unreality of the doll begins to spoil its pleasure, it will start mothering something with life in it—a kitten for preference, and if no kitten, or puppy or other such creature easy to be handled or cuddled, is at hand, it will take kindly to any mild-mannered old gentleman of its circle.
It is just these first instinctive impulses of the girl-child, combined with her imitativeness and wonderful precocity, which make her so fascinating. But do they think? They do, but this first early thinking does not make them self-conscious as does their later thinking, to the spoiling of their charm. The thinking indeed begins remarkably early. I remember one child, a little five-year-old and one of my favourites, climbing to my knee one day and exhibiting a strangely grave face. "Doris, what makes you look so serious?" I asked. And after a few moments of silence, during which she appeared to be thinking hard, she startled me by asking me what was the use of living, and other questions which it almost frightened me to hear from those childish innocent lips. Yet I have seen this child grow up to womanhood—a quite commonplace conventional woman, who when she has a child of her own of five would be unspeakably shocked to hear from it the very things she herself spoke at that tender age. And if I were to repeat to her now the words she spoke (the very thought of Byron in his know-that-whatever-thou-hast-been-'Twere-something-better-not-to-be poem) she would not believe it.
It is, however, rare for the child mind in its first essays at reflection to take so far a flight. It begins as a rule like the fledgling by climbing with difficulty out of the nest and on to the nearest branches.
It is interesting to observe these first movements. Quite recently I met with a child of about the same age as the one just described, who exhibited herself to me in the very act of trying to climb out of the nest—trying to grasp something with her claws, so to speak, and pull herself up. She was and is a very beautiful child, full of life and fun and laughter, and came out to me when I was sitting on the lawn to ask me for a story.
"Very well," I said. "But you must wait for half an hour until I remember all about it before I begin. It is a long story about things that happened a long time ago."
She waited as patiently as she could for about three minutes, and then said: "What do you mean by a long time ago?"
I explained, but could see that I had not made her understand, and at last put it in days, then weeks, then seasons, then years, until she appeared to grasp the meaning of a year, and then finished by saying a long time ago in this case meant a hundred years.
Again she was at a loss, but still trying to understand she asked me:
"What is a hundred years?"
"Why, it's a hundred years," I replied. "Can you count to a hundred?"
"I'll try," she said, and began to count and got to nineteen, then stopped. I prompted her, and she went on to twenty-nine, and so on, hesitating after each nine, until she reached fifty. "That's enough," I said, "it's too hard to go the whole way; but now don't you begin to understand what a hundred years means?"