That was the marvellous reward of
having grown to be so old; she was ten, now, an advanced age--almost
grown up! She could look back, across the eons which separated her
from seven-years-old, and dimly re-vision, as a stranger, the little
girl who cried her first day in the Primary Grade. How absurd seemed
that bashful, timid, ignorant little silly! She knew nothing at all.
She still thought there was a Santa Claus!--would you believe that?
And, even at eight, she had lingering fancies of fairies dancing on
the flower-beds by moonlight, and talking in some mysterious
language with the flowers!
Now she was much wiser. She knew that fairies lived only in books
and pictures; that flowers could not actually converse. Well. . .
she almost knew. Sometimes, when she was all alone--out in the
summerhouse on a drowsy afternoon, or in the glimmering twilight
when that one very bright and knowing star peered in at her,
solitary, on the side porch, or when, later, the moonshine stole
through the window and onto her pillow, so thick and white she could
almost feel it with her fingers--at such times vague fancies would
get tangled up with the facts of reality, and disturb her new,
assured sense of wisdom.
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