f his
neck, and he who does the constructive tasks of the world uses different
and higher organs."

"I have taught much spelling," the teacher said quietly.

"You will forgive me for being so enthusiastic. These things are fresh
to me," I said.

"The little girl is ten, you say?"

"Yes."

"She has a fine chance," the teacher remarked presently. "It saddens me
to think of my myriads. But we do our best----"

"That is one sure thing," I said quickly.

"Still you are taking her away from us."

I felt a throb of meaning from that. I had to be sure she meant just as
much as that throb meant to me. Constructive realisations come this way.

"What do you mean--taking her away?"

"You will make a solitary of her. She will not be of the world. You deal
with one lovingly. It will become more and more a part of your work.
Your work is of a kind to show you the way. She is following rapidly. I
believe you have established the point that one can learn best from
within, but one who does, must be so much alone. The ways will be lost
between her and her generation--as represented by my five classes each
day."

I had done a good deal of talking, but the teacher had guided me
straight to the crossing--and with very few words. I realised now that
more and more, I was undertaking to show the little girl short cuts to
possessions that I had found valuable, but for which I had been forced
to go around, and often with difficulty. Above all, I was trying to keep
open that dream-passage, to keep unclouded that lens between spirit and
flesh through which fairies are seen and the lustrous connecting lines
around all things. By every impulse I was arousing imagination--it is
all said in that. In doing this, was I also making a "solitary" of
her--lifting her apart from the many?

There was no squirming out. I was doing exactly this; and if I went on,
the job would be done more and more completely.

"She is not strange or different now," I said, "but see what will
happen. She will find it harder and harder to stay. She will begin
searching for those who liberate her. They are hard to find--not to be
found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams--but the many will
not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know
who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were
Solitaries--that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not
have one stay with the many--just to avoid the loneli