idle to tell me to think. I could only think
when I was moved from within to think. That made me the despair of my
father and the vessel of my schoolmaster's wrath. So here I saw no
relationship whatsoever between the two appearances. Now, of course, I
do. I see now that both were fairies, informed spirits of certain
times or places. For time has a spirit as well as space. But more of
this in due season. I am not synthesising now but recording. One had
been merely curious, the other for a time enthralled me. The first had
been made when I was too young to be interested. The second found me
more prepared, and seeded in my brain for many a day. Gradually,
however, it too faded as fancy began to develop within me. I took to
writing, I began to fall in love; and at fifteen I went to a
boarding-school. Farewell, then, to rewards and fairies!

THE GODS IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE

Who am I to treat of the private affairs of my betters, to evoke your
fragrant names, Felicite, Perpetua, loves of my tender youth? Shall I
forget thee, Emilia, thy slow smile and peering brown eyes of mischief
or appeal? Rosy Lauretta, or thee, whom I wooed desperately from afar,
lured by thy buxom wellbeing, thy meek and schooled replies? And if I
forget you not, how shall I explore you as maladies, trace out the
stages of your conquest as if you were spores? Never, never. Worship
went up from me to you, and worship is religion, and religion is
sacred. So, my dears, were you, each of you in your turn, sacred in
your shrines. Before each of you in turn I fell down, suddenly, "_Come
corpo morto cadde_." And to each of you in turn I devoted those waking
hours which fancy had hitherto claimed of me. Yet this I do feel free
to say, by leave of you ladies, that calf-love has not the educative
value of the genuine passion. It is blind worship by instinct; it is a
sign of awakening sense, but it is not its awakener. It is a lovely
thing as all quick or burning growth is, but it has little relation
to the soul, and our Northern state is the more gracious that
consummation of it is not feasible. Apart from the very obvious
drawbacks there is one not quite so obvious: I mean the early
exhaustion of imaginative sympathy. Love, indeed, is an affair of
maturity. I don't believe that a man, in this country, can love before
forty or a woman before thirty-five. They may marry before that and
have children; and they will love their children, but very rarely each