know of; she
only runs away to be run after, and if you do not pursue her, she comes
back--always."

Bebee did not understand at all.

"I thought God made women?" she said, a little awe-stricken.

* * *

There is a dignity of peasants as well as of kings--the dignity that
comes from all absence of effort, all freedom from pretence. Bebee had
this, and she had more still than this: she had the absolute simplicity
of childhood with her still.

Some women have it still when they are fourscore.

* * *

Prosper Bar, who is a Calvinist, always says, "Do not mix up prayer and
play; you would not cut a gherkin in your honey;" but I do not know why
he called prayer a gherkin, because it is sweet enough--sweeter than
anything, I think.

* * *

There is not much change in the great Soignies woods. They are aisles on
aisles of beautiful green trees, crossing and recrossing; tunnels of
dark foliage that look endless; long avenues of beech, of oak, of elm,
or of fir, with the bracken and the brushwood growing dense between; a
delicious forest growth everywhere, shady even at noon, and, by a little
past midday, dusky as evening; with the forest fragrance, sweet and
dewy, all about, and under the fern the stirring of wild game, and the
white gleam of little rabbits, and the sound of the wings of birds.

Soignies is not legend-haunted like the Black Forest, nor king-haunted
like Fontainebleau, nor sovereign of two historic streams like the brave
woods of Heidelberg; nor wild and romantic, and broken with black rocks,
and poetised by the shade of Jaques, and swept through by a perfect
river, like its neighbours of Ardennes; nor throned aloft on mighty
mountains like the majestic oak glades of the Swabian hills of the
ivory-carvers.

Soignies is only a Flemish forest in a plain, throwing its shadow over
corn-fields and cattle-pastures, with no panorama beyond it and no
wonders in its depth. But it is a fresh, bold, beautiful forest for all
that.

It has only green leaves to give--green leaves always, league after
league; but there is about it that vague mystery which all forests have,
and this universe of leaves seems boundless, and Pan might dwell in it,
and St. Hubert, and John Keats.

* * *

"I am going to learn to be very wise, dear," she told them; "I shall not
have time to dance or to play."

"But people are not merry when they are wise,