his very own, and go about and show
it to people, and excite their envy or win their respect. Charlotte
was only too pleased to take the child-angel seated at the lady's feet,
grappling with a musical instrument much too big for her. Charlotte
wanted wings badly, and, next to those, a guitar or a banjo. The angel,
besides, wore an amber necklace, which took her fancy immensely.

This left the picture allotted, with the exception of two or three more
angels, who peeped or perched behind the main figures with a certain
subdued drollery in their faces, as if the thing had gone on long
enough, and it was now time to upset something or kick up a row of some
sort. We knew these good folk to be saints and angels, because we had
been told they were; otherwise we should never have guessed it.
Angels, as we knew them in our Sunday books, were vapid, colourless,
uninteresting characters, with straight up-and-down sort of figures,
white nightgowns, white wings, and the same straight yellow hair parted
in the middle. They were serious, even melancholy; and we had no desire
to have any traffic with them. These bright bejewelled little persons,
however, piquant of face and radiant of feather, were evidently hatched
from quite a different egg, and we felt we might have interests in
common with them. Short-nosed, shock-headed, with mouths that went up
at the corners and with an evident disregard for all their fine clothes,
they would be the best of good company, we felt sure, if only we could
manage to get at them. One doubt alone disturbed my mind. In games
requiring agility, those wings of theirs would give them a tremendous
pull. Could they be trusted to play fair? I asked Selina, who replied
scornfully that angels always played fair. But I went back and had
another look at the brown-faced one peeping over the back of the lady's
chair, and still I had my doubts.

When Edward went off to school a great deal of adjustment and
re-allotment took place, and all the heroes of illustrated literature
were at my call, did I choose to possess them. In this particular case,
however, I made no haste to seize upon the armour-man. Perhaps it was
because I wanted a fresh saint of my own, not a stale saint that Edward
had been for so long a time. Perhaps it was rather that, ever since I
had elected to be saintless, I had got into the habit of strolling off
into the background, and amusing myself with what I found there. A very
fascinating backgrou