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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_,
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