It Is True That The Child's Beautiful Life
Is A Brief One, Like That Of The Angel-Insect, And May
Be told in a
paragraph; yet if I were to write only as many of them as there are
"Lives"
In Plutarch it would still take an entire book - an octavo of at
least three hundred pages. But though I can't write the book I shall
not leave the subject just yet, and so will make a pause here, to
continue the subject in the next sketch, then the next to follow, and
probably the next after that.
XVII
MILLICENT AND ANOTHER
They were two quite small maidies, aged respectively four and six years
with some odd months in each case. They are older now and have probably
forgotten the stranger to whom they gave their fresh little hearts, who
presently left their country never to return; for all this happened a
long time ago - I think about three years. In a way they were rivals,
yet had never seen one another, perhaps never will, since they inhabit
two villages more than a dozen miles apart in a wild, desolate, hilly
district of West Cornwall.
Let me first speak of Millicent, the elder. I knew Millicent well,
having at various times spent several weeks with her in her parents'
house, and she, an only child, was naturally regarded as the most
important person in it. In Cornwall it is always so. Tall for her
years, straight and slim, with no red colour on her cheeks; she had
brown hair and large serious grey eyes; those eyes and her general air
of gravity, and her forehead, which was too broad for perfect beauty,
made me a little shy of her and we were not too intimate.
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