"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I have finished this story.
"Yes," I tell her.
"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.
Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.
"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to housekeep that garden."
"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.
"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."
I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics, learning—there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow, flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.
I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little Child something of what I thought to do—breaking in upon the old woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say, one foot in the universe.
"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head, "I'm real glad you're going to be here. I dread saying anything."