IX


I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed,
took something from my consternation. A very few of them,
in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils,
without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies
and even to odious memories a kind of brush of the sponge.
I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary
childish grace as a thing I could actively cultivate,
and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself
to this source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I
can express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my
new lights; it would doubtless have been, however, a greater
tension still had it not been so frequently successful.
I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I
thought strange things about them; and the circumstances that
these things only made them more interesting was not by itself
a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they
should see that they WERE so immensely more interesting.
Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation I
so often did, any clouding of their innocence could only be--
blameless and foredoomed as they were--a reason the more for
taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible impulse,
I found myself catching them up and pressing them to my heart.
As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself:
"What will they think of that? Doesn't it betray too much?"