All the sweet lore of childhood was theirs in common. All the wise
Ignorance of his Yesterdays she shared.

Only in the boy's forbidden friendship with that one who had such
knowledge of evil the little girl did not share. This knowledge--the
knowledge that was to go with him, even in his manhood years, and
which, at last, would teach him the real value of Ignorance--the boy
gained alone. Sadly, the man remembered how, sometimes, when the boy
had stolen away to drink at that first muddy fountain of evil, he
would hear her calling and would be held from answering by the jeers
of his wicked teacher. But never when he was playing with the little
girl did the boy answer the signal whistle of that one whose knowledge
he envied but of whose friendship he was ashamed.

In his Yesterdays, the ignorance of his little girl mate was an anchor
that held the boy from drifting too far in the current of evil. In his
Yesterdays, the goodness and wisdom of his father was not a
will-o'-the-wisp but, to the boy, a steady guiding light. What
mattered, then, if the knowledge of the old negro _was_ but a
foolish mirage? What mattered if the hired man did _not_ know
about fairies or if he _did_ know so many things that were not
so? So it was that the man came to know the value of Ignorance. So it
was that the man did not fall into the pit of saying: "There is only
Ignorance."

And so it was, as he returned again from his Yesterdays, that day when
even the reeking atmosphere of the city could not hide, altogether,
the sweetness of the spring, that the memory of the little girl was
with him even as the perfume of the season was in the air.