to assume that the same thing would happen again. I should not
invest largely in pumpkins with an eye to the motor trade.
Cinderella got a ball dress from the fairy; but I do not suppose
that she looked after her own clothes any the less after it.

But the view that fairy tales cannot really have happened,
though crazy, is common. The man I speak of disbelieved
in fairy tales in an even more amazing and perverted sense.
He actually thought that fairy tales ought not to be told
to children. That is (like a belief in slavery or annexation)
one of those intellectual errors which lie very near
to ordinary mortal sins. There are some refusals which,
though they may be done what is called conscientiously,
yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them,
that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly
corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of milk to young
mothers when their husbands were in the field against us.
Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.

. . . . .

The man had come to see me in connection with some silly society
of which I am an enthusiastic member; he was a fresh-coloured,
short-sighted young man, like a stray curate who was too
helpless even to find his way to the Church of England. He had a
curious green necktie and a very long neck; I am always meeting
idealists with very long necks. Perhaps it is that their eternal
aspiration slowly lifts their heads nearer and nearer to the stars.
Or perhaps it has something to do with the fact that so many of
them are vegetarians: perhaps they are slowly evolving the neck of