knew that other children were unpleasant. For the rest, she was neither
extravagantly glad nor extravagantly sorry. She preserved a fine
indifference.... And yet, although, here my story may seem to
matter-of-fact persons to take a turn towards the fantastic, this was
not quite all. Nancy herself, dimly and yet uneasily, was aware that
there was something else.

She was not a little girl who believed in fairies or witches or the
"bogey man," or anything indeed that she could not see. She inherited
from her mother a splendid confidence in the reality, the solid,
unquestioned reality of all concrete and tangible things. She had been
presented once with a fine edition of "Grimm's Fairy Tales," an edition
with coloured pictures and every allure. She had turned its pages with a
look of incredulous amazement. "What," she seemed to say--she was then
aged three and a half--"are these absurd things that you are telling me?
People aren't like that. Mother isn't in the least like that. I don't
understand this, and it's tedious!"

"I'm afraid the child has no imagination," said her nurse.

"What a lucky thing!" said her mother.

Nor could Mrs. Ross's house be said to be a place that encouraged
fairies. They would have found the gilt chairs hard to sit upon, and
there were no mysterious corners. There was nothing mysterious at all.
And yet Nancy Ross, sitting in her magnificent clothes, was conscious as
she advanced towards her sixth year that she was not perfectly
comfortable. To say that she felt lonely would be, perhaps, to emphasise
too strongly her discomfort. It was perhaps rather that she felt
inquisitive--only a little, a very little--but she did begin to wish