as I had enjoyed the grace of
the older girls, it was now just as it had been before in France, and
the clumsiness of the child seemed to have a significance and a sort of
beauty of its own, quite above this grace of the others in power to
affect the heart. I had looked on with a certain sense of balance and
completion at the silent, rapid, masterly evolutions of the eldest; I
had been pleased by these in the way of satisfaction. But when little
broken-nose began her pantomime of indecision I grew excited. There was
something quite fresh and poignant in the delight I took in her
imperfect movements. I remember, for instance, that I moved my own
shoulders, as if to imitate her; really, I suppose, with an inarticulate
wish to help her out.

Now, there are many reasons why this gracelessness of young children
should be pretty and sympathetic to us. And, first, there is an interest
as of battle. It is in travail and laughable _fiasco_ that the young
school their bodies to beautiful expression, as they school their minds.
We seem, in watching them, to divine antagonists pitted one against the
other; and, as in other wars, so in this war of the intelligence against
the unwilling body, we do not wish to see even the cause of progress
triumph without some honourable toil; and we are so sure of the ultimate
result, that it pleases us to linger in pathetic sympathy over these
reverses of the early campaign, just as we do over the troubles that
environ the heroine of a novel on her way to the happy ending. Again,
people are very ready to disown the pleasure they take in a thing
merely because it is big, as an Alp, or merely because it is little, as
a little child; and yet this pleasure is surely as legitimate as
another. There is much of it here; we have an irrational indulgence for
small folk; we ask but little where there is so little to ask it of; we
cannot overcome our astonishment that they should be able to move at
all, and are interested in their movements somewhat as we are interested
in the movements of a puppet. And again, there is a prolongation of
expectancy when, as in these movements of children, we are kept
continually on the very point of attainment and ever turned away and
tantalised by some humorous imperfection. This is altogether absent in
the secure and accomplished movements of persons more fully grown. The
tight-rope walker does not walk so freely or so well as any one else can
walk upon a good road; and yet