remember my birthday.

I have read since in one of those musty books of Bunratty, that
_moths_ and _butterflies_ come to life by shaking themselves out, one
fine day, from a dull-looking, shapeless, ugly thing they call a
_grub_, in which they have been buried for a long time. They unfold
their wings and fly out in the sunshine, and flit from flower to
flower, and they look beautiful and happy--the world, the wicked
world, is open to them.

There were pictures in the book; the ugly grub below, dreary and
brown, and the lovely _butterfly_ in all its colours above. I showed
them to Madeleine, and said: "Look, Madeleine, as we were, and as we
are."

And she said: "Yes, those brown gowns they made us wear were ugly; but
I should not like to put on anything so bright as red and yellow.
Would you?"

That is the worst of Madeleine; she never realises in the least what I
mean. And she _does_ love her clothes; that is the difference between
her and me, she loves fine things because they are fine and dainty and
all that--I like them because they make _me_ fine.

And yet, how she did weep when she left the convent. Madeleine would
have made a good nun after all; she does so hate anything ugly or
coarse. She grows quite white if she hears people fighting; if there
is a "row" or a "shindy," as they say here. Whereas Tanty and I think
it all the fun in the world, and would enjoy joining in the fray
ourselves, I believe, if we dared. I know _I_ should; it sets my blood
tingling. But Madeleine is a real princess, a sort of Ermine; and yet
she enjoys her new life, too, the beauty of it, the refinement, being
waited upon and delicately fed and clothed. But although she has
ceased to weep for the convent, if it had not been for me she would be
there still. The only thing, I believe, that could make me weep now
would be to find one fine morning that this had only been a dream, and
that I was once more _the grub_! To find that I could not open my
window and look into the wide, wide world over to the long, green
hills in the distance, and know that I could wander or gallop up to
them, as I did at Bunratty, and see for myself _what lies
beyond_--surely that was a taste of heaven that day when Tanty Rose
first allowed me to mount her old pony, and I flew over the turf with
the wind whistling in my ears--to find that I could not go out when I
pleased and hear new voices and see new faces, and men and women who
_live each their own life_,