My story is two stories: one cast by reality, the other woven by imagination. And it is only natural that truth should arrange its events as though they were imaginary, just as fancy disguises itself in the garb of the real. As for this inverse comparison, it was my little daughter who carried me to it on her sixth birthday, the day I watched her stepping along, proud of her new dress, rosy-cheeked, with her small companions as they lined up around the delicious table and sang her the familiar song, while the heroine, in the midst of it, gathered her breath to send it out in a single puff that would put out the flame of the six candles adorning the fresh sweet centerpiece. Then the applause rose, and after it a sudden silence spread, as the little mouths set busily to chewing; and even this the children soon forgot, taken up with the distraction of the new toys: and lo, the dainties and sweets were crumbs; and lo, they stood around the heaped-up presents, longing to undo them, their eyes sparkling. And since that task belonged to the birthday girl alone, everyone crowded around to watch her as she cried
out over a doll, the gift of one of my friends, the like of which she had never possessed! Yet for all her longing for it, her joy did not make her forget to give her opinion of it: after expressing her thanks to the "grown-up" friend, she said she was very sorry that the color of the doll's dress did not match her own pink frock, made ready for this occasion!
When I tried to cut her short, to hide my embarrassment at a
remark not free of a heedless whim, I do not know how the grown-up friend got ahead of me — the jest had charmed her — and promised to exchange the doll for another with a pink gown. I found no escape but to yield to her victory, if only for the moment, to preserve the reigning air of merriment; and perhaps my silence would have lasted to the very end, in keeping with what modern child-rearing requires, which holds a promise made to a child sacred and sees in the frankness of her expression, as that devoted friend saw, a sensitive, artistic phenomenon — to stifle it a crime! And more than that, it is a trailing vine that screens the formality which the years impose between their two
ages. Does not every "little one" wish he were grown up? And does not every "grown-up" long for the time when he was "little"???
And I drifted off into the dreams of my childhood, and they brought me to a halt at an incident I could have wished had worn the longed-for pink dress, upon which the memories had bestowed their fresh and flowery garb! For it stood alone in the shape of a harsh trial, by which my gift-giver tested me, without her knowledge, a bitter testing... It carried me toward impressions that defy reality with their majesty and overwhelm the senses with their brilliance, carved into the conscience, firm of being, which no effacement or forgetting can master!
Until the laps of my bygone childhood outran the present childhood of my daughter, and showed me myself, at an age very near to hers, during a visit with my family to a noble and venerable lady. This aged dame thought to draw near to me, hoping to coax me away from my mother, to whom, in that strange atmosphere, I clung as a shadow clings, the way timid children do. She drew me gently along, crossing with me the great hall, whose far-flung corners teemed with every kind of curio and rarity — among them the cabinet of her hobby, its shelves lined with what the hand of the skilled craftsman had lavished: elegant dolls whose costumes were colored in every style and sort, and in which the races differed in feature and in stock.