eferring to the Village with contemptuous irritation. "They pretend
to be seeking after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of
thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality."

Yes, to a certain extent that is true--true of a portion of the
Village, at any rate, and a certain percentage of the Villagers. But
even if it is true, it is the sort of truth that needs only a bit of
understanding to make us tender and tolerant instead of scornful and
hard. My dear lady, you who complained of the "play-acting," and you
other who, agreeing with her, see in the whimsies and pretenses in Our
Village only a spectacle of cheap affectation and artifice, have you
lived so long and yet do not know that the play-acting instinct is one
of the most universal of all instincts--the very first developed, and
the very last, I truly believe, to die in our faded bodies? From the
moment when we try to play ball with sunbeams through those
intermediate years wherein we imagine ourselves everything on earth
that we are not, down to those last days of all, when we live, all
furtive and unsuspected, a secret life of the spirit--either a life
of remembrance or a life of imagination visualising what we have
wanted and have missed,--what do we do but pretend,--make
believe,--pose, if you will? When we are little we pretend to be
knights and ladies, pirates and fairy princesses, soldiers and Red
Cross nurses, and sailors and hunters and explorers. We people the
window boxes with elves and pixies and the dark corners with Red
Indians and bears. The commonplace world about us is not truly
commonplace, since our fancy, still fresh from eternity, can transform
three dusty shrubs into an enchanted forest, and an automobile into
the most deliciously formidable of the Dragon Family. A bit later, our
pretending is done more cautiously. We do not confess our shy flights
of imagination: we take a prosaic outward pose, and try not to
advertise the fact that our geese wear (to our eyes) swans' plumage,
and that our individual roles are (to our own view) always those of
heroes and heroines. No one of us but mentally sees himself or herself
doing something which is as impracticable as cloud-riding. No one of
us but dreams of the impossible and in a shamefaced, almost
clandestine, fashion pictures it and lingers over it. All
make-believe, you see, only we hate to admit it! The different thing
about Greenwich is that there they do admit it, quite a number of