"But you must wait for half an hour until I
remember all about it before I begin. It is a long story about things
that happened a long time ago."
She waited as patiently as she could for about three minutes, and then
said: "What do you mean by a long time ago?"
I explained, but could see that I had not made her understand, and at
last put it in days, then weeks, then seasons, then years, until she
appeared to grasp the meaning of a year, and then finished by saying a
long time ago in this case meant a hundred years.
Again she was at a loss, but still trying to understand she asked me:
"What is a hundred years?"
"Why, it's a hundred years," I replied. "Can you count to a hundred?"
"I'll try," she said, and began to count and got to nineteen, then
stopped. I prompted her, and she went on to twenty-nine, and so on,
hesitating after each nine, until she reached fifty. "That's enough," I
said, "it's too hard to go the whole way; but now don't you begin to
understand what a hundred years means?"
She looked at me and then away, and her beautiful blue intelligent eyes
told me plainly that she did not, and that she felt baffled and
worried.
After an interval she pointed to the hedge. "Look at the leaves," she
said. "I could go and count a hundred leaves, couldn't I? Well, would
that be a hundred years?"
And no further could we get, since I could not make out just what the
question meant. At first it looked as if she thought of the leaves as
an illustration - or a symbol; and then that she had failed to grasp the
idea of time, or that it had slipped from her, and she had fallen back,
as it were, to the notion that a hundred meant a hundred objects, which
you could see and feel. There appeared to be no way out of the puzzle-
dom into which we had both got, so that it came as a relief to both of
us when she heard her mother calling - calling her back into a world she
could understand.
I believe that when we penetrate to the real mind of girl children we
find a strong likeness in them even when they appear to differ as
widely from one another as adults do. The difference in the little ones
is less in disposition and character than in unlikeness due to
unconscious imitation. They take their mental colour from their
surroundings. The red men of America are the gravest people on the
globe, and their children are like them when with them; but this
unnatural gravity is on the surface and is a mask which drops or fades
off when they assemble together out of sight and hearing of their
elders.
