uttercup is at home, and that
with the close of her bondage comes a grace and a naturalness that take
her out of the realms of bread-and-butter. However difficult it may be
for her maturer rivals to abdicate, it is the buttercup in fact who
gives the tone to the holidays. There is a subtle contagion about
pleasure, and it is from her that we catch the sense of largeness and
liberty and physical enjoyment that gives a new zest to life. She laughs
at our moans about sunshine as she laughs at our moans about mud, till
we are as indifferent to mud and sunshine as she is herself. The whole
atmosphere of our life is in fact changed, and it is amusing to
recognize how much of the change we owe to the buttercup.

It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the
whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more
of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene.
But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm
lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of
shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of
shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the
beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases,
girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers of one
faculty and stranger developements of another; full of startling
effects, of contrasts and surprises, of light and shade, that no other
phase of life affords. Unconsciously month after month drifts the
buttercup on to womanhood; consciously she lives in the past of the
child. She comes to us trailing clouds of glory--as Wordsworth
sings--from her earlier existence, from her home, her schoolroom, her
catechism. The girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by
clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the
buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as
he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very
shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a
keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude
for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the
confirmation ticket. Free as she is from fancies, her conception of the
daily life of her clergyman shows amusingly enough that she can attain a
very fair pitch of idealism. We remember the story of a certain parson
of our acquai