way of thinking and judging was sometimes more like that of a grown-up
person. The two alternated, and the result was an odd confusion; for
sometimes he felt like a child and thought like a man, while at others
he felt like a man and thought like a child. Something had gone wrong,
very much wrong; and, as he watched this group of silent children facing
him, he knew suddenly that what was just beginning to happen to him _had
happened to them long, long ago_.

For they looked as if they had been a long, long time in the world, yet
their bodies had not kept pace with their minds. Something had happened
to stop the growth of the body, while allowing the mind to go on
developing. The bodies were not stunted or deformed; they were
well-formed, nice little children's bodies, but the minds within them
were grown-up, and the incongruity was distressing. All this he suddenly
realised in a flash, intuitively, just as though it had been most
elaborately explained to him; yet he could not have put the least part
of it into words or have explained what he saw and felt to another.

He saw that they had the hands and figures of children, the heads of
children, the unlined faces and smooth foreheads of children, but their
gestures, and something in their movements, belonged to grown-up people,
and the expression of their eyes in meaning and intelligence was the
expression of old people and not of children. And the expression in the
eyes of every one of them he saw was the expression of terror and of
pain. The effect was so singular that he seemed face to face with an
entirely new order of creatures: a child's features with a man's eyes; a
child's figure with a woman's movements; full-grown souls cramped and
cribbed in absurdly inadequate bodies and little, puny frames; the old
trying uncouthly to express itself in the young.

The grown-up, old portion of him had been uppermost as he stared and
received these impressions, but now suddenly it passed away, and he felt
as a little boy again. He glanced quickly down at his own little body in
the alpaca knickerbockers and sailor blouse, and then, with a sigh of
relief, looked up again at the strange group facing him. So far, at any
rate, he had not changed, and there was nothing yet to suggest that he
was becoming like them in appearance at least.

With his back against the door he faced the roomful of children who
stood there motionless and staring; and as he looked, wild feelings
rushed