Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault,
and it never made Miles a muff) that kept them--how shall I
express it?--almost impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable.
They were like the cherubs of the anecdote, who had--
morally, at any rate--nothing to whack! I remember feeling
with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no history.
We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in this
beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive,
yet extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature
of his age I have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day.
He had never for a second suffered. I took this as a
direct disproof of his having really been chastised.
If he had been wicked he would have "caught" it, and I should
have caught it by the rebound--I should have found the trace.
I found nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel.
He never spoke of his school, never mentioned a comrade or a master;
and I, for my part, was quite too much disgusted to allude to them.
Of course I was under the spell, and the wonderful part
is that, even at the time, I perfectly knew I was.
But I gave myself up to it; it was an antidote to any pain,
and I had more pains than one. I was in receipt in these days
of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well.
But with my children, what things in the world mattered?
That was the question I used to put to my scrappy retirements.
I was dazzled by their loveliness.

There was a Sunday--to get on--when it rained with such force
and for so many hours that there could be no procession to church;
in consequence of which, as the day declined, I had arranged