"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.
"Still you are taking her away from us."
I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.
"What do you mean—taking her away?"
"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work. Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I believe you have established the point that one can learn best from within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost between her and her generation—as represented by my five classes each day."
I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me straight to the crossing—and with very few words. I realised now that more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination—it is all said in that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of her—lifting her apart from the many?
There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on, the job would be done more and more completely.
"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find—not to be found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams—but the many will not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were Solitaries—that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not have one stay with the many—just to avoid the loneliness and the heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. Everything done in the world that is loved and remembered—every life lived with beauty and productiveness to the many—has come from the Solitaries. Quest, that is the greatest word in English. One must have imagination to set out on the quest.... In reality we only search for our real selves—that which we yearn toward is the arousing of the half-gods within. When they are fully awake, we return to tell the many. Perhaps we do meet a more poignant suffering—but that is an honour——"
The teacher was smiling at me again. "Do you not see," she asked, "that all that you do and say and teach is for those who have the essential imagination?"
"But children have it," I said.