imaginations are desperate things to encounter. There is nothing beyond
their reach. Our safety from them lies in the fact that they are always
seeing too much, and imagining too wildly; so that, with a little help
from us, they may be taught to distrust themselves; and when they have
once distrusted themselves, we need not afterwards fear them: their
supernatural vitality has vanished. I fancy my pretty Alice to be in
this state now. She leaves us to-morrow. In the autumn we shall have
her with us again, and Louise will scan her compassionately. I desire
that they should meet. It will be hardly fair to the English girl, but,
if I stand in the gap between them, I shall summon up no small quantity
of dormant compatriotic feeling. The contemplation of the contrast, too,
may save me from both: like the logic ass with the two trusses of hay on
either side of him.




CHAPTER VI

SHE

I am at home. There was never anybody who felt so strange in her home.
It is not a month since I left my sisters, and I hardly remember that I
know them. They all, and even papa, appear to be thinking about such
petty things. They complain that I tell them nothing. What have I to
tell? My Prince! my own Leboo, if I might lie in the stall with you,
then I should feel thoroughly happy! That is, if I could fall asleep.
Evelina declares we are not eight miles from Dayton. It seems to me I
am eight millions of miles distant, and shall be all my life travelling
along a weary road to get there again just for one long sunny day. And