s, eyes,
arms, strange sounds and sweet smells, said to her: "And did your
beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving
mamma?" Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa
to be, after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her
mother's appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to
her little innocent lips. "He said I was to tell you, from him," she
faithfully reported, "that you're a nasty horrid pig!"

II

In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child's
mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as
the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith
that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had
calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little
feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The
evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other
they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless
receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the
world as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her
safeguard against the other. She was at the age for which all stories
are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute,
the present alone was vivid. The objurgation for instance launched
in the carriage by her mother after she had at her father's bidding
punctually performed was a missive that dropped into her memory with the
dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box. Like the letter it
was, as part of the contents of a well-stuffed post-bag, delivered in
due course at the right address. In the presence of these overflowings,
after they had continued for a couple of years, the associates of either
party sometimes felt that something should be done for what they called
"the real good, don't you know?" of the child. The only thing done,
however, in general, took place when it was sighingly remarked that she
fortunately wasn't all the year round where she happened to be at the
awkward moment, and that, furthermore, either from extreme cunning or
from extreme stupidity, she appeared not to take things in.

The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents,
corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete
vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was
literally a moral rev