Sometimes the walls of the house are transparent, like a frog's foot,
and you see the prisoner throbbing and quivering inside. This is rare.
Shelley's house must have been a filmy tenement of the kind. With
children--if you catch them young enough--it is more common. I
remember one whom I used to see nearly every day, the child of poor
parents, who kept a green-grocer's shop in Judd Street, Saint Pancras,
a still little creature moving about in worlds not recognised. She was
slim and small, fair-haired, honey-coloured, her eyes wells of blue. I
used to see her standing at the door of the shop, amid baskets of
green stuff, crimsoned rhubarb, pyramided dates, and what not. I never
saw her dirty or untidy, nor heard her speak, nor saw her laugh. She
stood or leaned at the lintel, watching I know not what, but certainly
not anything really there, as we say. She appeared to be looking
through objects rather than at them. I can describe it no otherwise
than that I, or another, crossed her field of vision and was conscious
that her eyes met mine and yet did not see me. To me she was instantly
remarkable, not for this and not for any beauty she had--for she was
not at all extraordinary in that quality--but for this, that she was
not of our kind. Surrounded by other children, playing gaily, circling
about her, she was _sui generis_. She carried her own atmosphere,
whereby in the company of others she seemed unaccountable, by herself
only, normal. Nature she fitted perfectly, but us she did not fit.
Now, it is a curious thing, accepted by all visionaries, that a
supernatural being, a spirit, fairy, not-human creature, if you see it
among animals, beasts and birds, on hills or in the folds of hills,
among trees, by waters, in fields of flowers, _looks at home_ and
evidently is so. The beasts are conscious of it, know it and have no
fear of it; the hills and valleys are its familiar places in a way
which they will never be to the likes of us. But put a man beside it