Nor were you bored by the newer personality of casual visitors, unless they held you, as aforesaid, and made you so listen to their unintelligible voices and so look at their mannered faces that they released you an older child than they took you prisoner.But--it is a reluctant confession--you were tired of your relations; you were weary of their bonnets.Measured by adult time, those bonnets were, it is to be presumed, of no more than reasonable duration; they had no more than the average or common life.You have no reason, looking back, to believe that your great-aunts wore bonnets for great and indefinite spaces of time.But, to your sense as a child, long and changing and developing days saw the same harassing artificial flowers hoisted up with the same black lace.You would have had a scruple of conscience as to really disliking the face, but you deliberately let yourself go in detesting the bonnet.So with dresses, especially such as had any little misfit about them.
For you it had always existed, and there was no promise of its ceasing.You seemed to have been aware of it for years.By the way, there would be less cheap reproving of little girls for desiring new clothes if the censors knew how immensely old their old clothes are to them.
The fact is that children have a simple sense of the unnecessary ugliness of things, and that--apart from the effects of ennui--they reject that ugliness actively.You have stood and listened to your mother's compliments on her friend's hat, and have made your mental protest in very definite words.You thought it hideous, and hideous things offended you then more than they have ever offended you since.At nine years old you made people, alas! responsible for their faces, as you do still in a measure, though you think you do not.You severely made them answer for their clothes, in a manner which you have seen good reason, in later life, to mitigate.Upon curls, or too much youthfulness in the aged, you had no mercy.To sum up the things you hated inordinately, they were friskiness of manner and of trimmings, and curls combined with rather bygone or frumpish fashions.Too much childish dislike was wasted so.
But you admired some things without regard to rules of beauty learnt later.At some seven years old you dwelt with delight upon the contrast of a white kid glove and a bright red wrist.Well, this is not the received arrangement, but red and white do go well together, and their distribution has to be taught with time.Whose were the wrist and glove? Certainly some one's who must have been distressed at the bouquet of colour that you admired.This, however, was but a local admiration.You did not admire the girl as a whole.She whom you adored was always a married woman of a certain age; rather faded, it might be, but always divinely elegant.She alone was worthy to stand at the side of your mother.You lay in wait for the border of her train, and dodged for a chance of holding her bracelet when she played.You composed prose in honour of her and called the composition (for reasons unknown to yourself) a "catalogue." She took singularly little notice of you.
Wordsworth cannot say too much of your passion for nature.The light of summer morning before sunrise was to you a spiritual splendour for which you wanted no name.The Mediterranean under the first perceptible touch of the moon, the calm southern sea in the full blossom of summer, the early spring everywhere, in the showery streets, in the fields, or at sea, left old childish memories with you which you try to evoke now when you see them again.But the cloudy dusk behind poplars on the plains of France, the flying landscape from the train, willows, and the last of the light, were more mournful to you then than you care to remember now.So were the black crosses on the graves of the French village; so were cypresses, though greatly beloved.
If you were happy enough to be an internationally educated child, you had much at heart the heart of every country you knew.You disliked the English accent of your compatriots abroad with a scorn to which, needless to say, you are not tempted now.You had shocks of delight from Swiss woods full of lilies of the valley, and from English fields full of cowslips.You had disquieting dreams of landscape and sun, and of many of these you cannot now tell which were visions of travel and which visions of slumber.Your strong sense of place made you love some places too keenly for peace.
End
