uring a future
hearing; for you knew too well that you would have to bear it all again.
You could not do the same with sermons, because, though even more
fatiguing, they were more or less different each time.

While your elders passed over some particularly tedious piece of road--and
a very tedious piece of road existed within short distance of every house
you lived in or stayed in--in their usual state of partial absence of
mind, you, on the contrary, perceived every inch of it. As to the length
of a bad night, or of a mere time of wakefulness at night, adult words do
not measure it; they hardly measure the time of merely waiting for sleep
in childhood. Moreover, you were tired of other things, apart from the
duration of time--the names of streets, the names of tradesmen,
especially the _fournisseurs_ of the household, who lived in them.

You were bored by people. It did not occur to you to be tired of those
of your own immediate family, for you loved them immemorially. 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