flaxened haired. And the suggestion is that of late summer, the colour
of wheat almost ready for the harvest, and darker, redder flowers--poppies
and others--than come in Spring.

The dark eyes, besides, are generally brighter--they shelter a more
liquid light than the blue or grey. Southern eyes have generally most
beautiful whites. And as to the charm of the childish figure, there is
usually an infantine slenderness in the little Southener that is at least
as young and sweet as the round form of the blond child. And yet the
painters of Italy would have none of it. They rejected the dusky
brilliant pale little Italians all about them; they would have none but
flaxen-haired children, and they would have nothing that was slim,
nothing that was thin, nothing that was shadowy. They rejoiced in much
fair flesh, and in all possible freshness. So it was in fair Flanders as
well as in dark Italy. But so it was not in Spain. The Pyrenees seemed
to interrupt the tradition. And as Murillo saw the charm of dark heads,
and the innocence of dark eyes, so did one English painter. Reynolds
painted young dark hair as tenderly as the youngest gold.




REAL CHILDHOOD


The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods
and of their impressions. Your hours when you were six were the enormous
hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quick
forgetfulness. Therefore when your mother's visitor held you so long at
his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up,