, mamma, _I_ couldn't learn to dance _at all_!" the little girl
exclaimed, as if surprised that her mother did not fully realize this
fact.

"Then, dearest, why do you want to go to dancing-school?" her mother
asked gently.

"The other girls in my class at school are all going," the child said.

Her mother was silent; and the little girl came closer and lifted
pleading eyes to her face. "_Please_ let me go!" she begged. "The others
are all going," she repeated.

"I could not bear to refuse her," the mother wrote to me later. "I let
her go. I feared that it would only make her feel her lameness the more
keenly and be a source of distress to her. But it isn't; she enjoys it.
She cannot even try to learn to dance; but she takes pleasure in being
present and watching the others, to say nothing of wearing a 'dancing-
school dress,' as they do. This morning she said to her father: 'I can't
dance, Papa; but I can talk about it. I learn how at dancing-school. Oh,
I love dancing-school!'"

Her particular accomplishment maybe of minute value in itself; but is
not her content in it a priceless good? If she can continue to enjoy
learning only to talk about the pleasures her lameness will not permit
her otherwise to share, her dancing-school lessons will have taught her
better things than they taught "the other children," who could dance.

That mother was her little girl's confidential friend as well as her
mother. The child, quite unreservedly, told her what she wanted and why
she wanted it. It was no weak indulgence of a child's whim, but a
genuine respect for another person's rights as an individual--even
though that individual was merely a little child--that led that mother
to allow her daughter to have what she wanted. May not some subtle sense
of this have been the basis of the child's happiness in the fulfillment
of her desire? She _wanted_ to go to dancing-school because the other
children were going; but may she not have _liked_ going because she felt
that her mother understood and sympathized with her desire to go?

A Frenchwoman to whom I once said that American parents treat their
children in many ways as though they were their contemporaries remarked,
"But does that not make the children old before their time?"

So far from this, it seems, on the contrary, to keep the parents young
after their time. It has been truly said that we have in America fewer
and fewer grandmothers who are "sweet old ladies," and more a