him the most wonderful fairy story there had ever been in
the world. And the thing that made it most wonderful of all was that,
while it was just like a fairy story in being wonderful, it was every bit
true. And then she told him a little of the great story of how one thing
became another thing, how everything grew out of something else, how it
had been doing that for millions of years, how he was what he was then
because through all those years one thing had changed, grown, into
something else.

As she told it it seemed so noble a thing to be telling a child, so
much purer and more dignified--to say nothing of more stimulating--than
the evasive tales of life employed in the attempt to thwart her
childish mind.

Worth was upon her with a hundred questions. _How_ did a worm become
something that wasn't a worm? Did it know it was going to do it? And why
did one worm go one way and in a lot of million years be a little boy
and another worm go another way and just never be anything but a worm?
Did she think in another hundred million years that little bird up there
would be something else? Would _they_ be anything else? And why--?

She saw that she had let herself in for a whole new world of whys. One
thing was certain: if she were to remain with Worth she would have to
find out more about evolution. Her knowledge was pitifully incommensurate
to his whys.

But it was beautiful to her the way his mind reached out to it. He was
lying on his stomach, head propped up on hands, in an almost prayerful
attitude before an ant hill. Did she think those little ants knew that
they were alive? Would they ever be anything else? He wanted to be told
more stories about things becoming other things, seemed intoxicated with
that idea of the constant becoming.

"But, Aunt Kate," he cried, "mama told me that God made me!"

"Why so He did, Worthie--that is, I suppose He did--but He didn't just
make you out of nothing."

He lay there on the grass in silence for a long time, looking at the
world about him--thinking. After a while he was singing a little song.
This was the song:

"Once I was a little worm--
Long--long--ago."

Katie smiled in thinking how scandalized Clara would be to have heard
the story just told her son, story moving him to sing a vulgar song about
having been a horrid little worm. It would be Clara's notion of propriety
to tell Worth that the doctor brought him in his motor car and expect his
mind, that wonderful,