ou. The forest pays you the great compliment of
ignoring you, and it does not care whether you see its intimate
possessions or not. I think perhaps no day is really unsuccessful that
gives you forest earth against your forehead, and forest grass between
your fingers, and high forest trees to stand between you and the ultimate
confession of failure.

Jay and Mr. Russell boarded out Christina the motor car for the day at
an inn, and then they sat and gradually introduced themselves to the
forest. Showers fell on their hatless heads, and they did not notice. A
mole rose like a submarine from the waves of the forest earth, and they
did not notice. The butterflies danced like little tunes in the sunlit
clearing, and they did not notice. And from a long way off, near the
swings, holiday shrieks trailed along the wind, and they did not notice.

Jay told Mr. Russell, one by one, small unmattering things that she
remembered out of her Secret World, and each time when she had told him
he wondered with regret why he had not remembered it by himself. He had
never thought it worth while to remember before; his imagination was
crippled, and needed crutches. He had not thought it worth while to think
much about the time when he was young, the time when his past had been as
big and shining as his future. The longer we live, it seems, the less we
remember, and no men and few women normally possess a secret story after
thirty. It would not matter so much if you only lost your story, a worse
fate than loss befalls it--you laugh at it. It is curious how the world
draws in as one gets older and wiser. The past catches one up, the future
burns away like a candle. I used to think that growing up was like
walking from one end of a meadow to the other, I thought that the meadow
would remain, and one had only to turn one's head to see it all again.
But now I know that growing up is like going through a door into a little
room, and the door shuts behind one.

I think Mr. Russell's point of difference from most older and wiser
people was that he had not forgotten the excitement of writing down
snatches of his secret story as it came to him, and the passion of
tearing up the thing that he wrote, and the delight of finding that he
could not tear it out of his heart. He was a silent person, and a
rather neglected person, and unbusinesslike, and unsuccessful, and
uncultured, and unsociable, and unbeautiful. So there was nothing
worse than emptiness