ut as all children
become reserved. Already you understand that your heart is very
preciously your own. You keep it from me and everyone, so much so, so
justifiably so, that when by virtue of our kindred and all that we have
in common I get sudden glimpses right into your depths, there mixes with
the swift spasm of love I feel, a dread--lest you should catch me, as it
were, spying into you and that one of us, I know not which, should feel
ashamed.

Every child passes into this secret stage; it closes in from its first
frankness; it carries off the growing jewel of its consciousness to hide
from all mankind.... I think I can see why this should be so, but I
cannot tell why in so many cases no jewel is given back again at last,
alight, ripened, wonderful, glowing with the deep fires of experience. I
think that is what ought to happen; it is what does happen now with true
poets and true artists. Someday I think it will be the life of all
normal human souls. But usually it does not seem to happen at all.
Children pass out of a stage--open, beautiful, exquisitely simple--into
silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life. And
they are lost. Out of the finished, careful, watchful, restrained and
limited man or woman, no child emerges again....

I remember very distinctly how I myself came by imperceptible increments
of reservation to withdraw those early delicacies of judgments, those
original and personal standards and appreciations, from sight and
expression. I can recall specific moments when I perceive now that my
little childish figure stood, as it were, obstinately and with a sense
of novelty in a doorway denying the self within.

It was partly, I think, a simple instinct that drew that curtain of
silences and concealments, it was much more a realization that I had no
power of lucidity to save the words and deeds I sought to make
expressive from complete misunderstanding. But most of all it was the
perception that I was under training and compulsion for ends that were
all askew and irrelevant to the trend of my imaginations, the quality of
my dreams. There was around me something unfriendly to this inner
world--something very ready to pass from unfriendliness to acute
hostility; and if, indeed, I succeeded in giving anything of my inner
self to others, it was only, as people put it, to give myself away.

My nurses, my governess, my tutor, my father, the servants about me,
seemed all bent upon impos