any such display of feeling, Phosy was much astonished: when Alice had
set her down and she had resumed her seat by the fireside, she went on
staring for a while--and then a strange sort of miming ensued.

It was Phosy's habit--one less rare with children than may by most be
imagined--to do what she could to enter into any state of mind whose
shows were sufficiently marked for her observation. She sought to lay
hold of the feeling that produced the expression: less than the
reproduction of a similar condition in her own imaginative sensorium,
subject to her leisurely examination, would in no case satisfy the
little metaphysician. But what was indeed very odd was the means she
took for arriving at the sympathetic knowledge she desired. As if she
had been the most earnest student of dramatic expression through the
facial muscles, she would sit watching the countenance of the object
of her solicitude, all the time, with full consciousness, fashioning
her own as nearly as she could into the lines and forms of the other:
in proportion as she succeeded, the small psychologist imagined she
felt in herself the condition that produced the phenomenon she
observed--as if the shape of her face cast inward its shadow upon her
mind, and so revealed to it, through the two faces, what was moving
and shaping in the mind of the other.

In the present instance, having at length, after modelling and
remodelling her face like that of a gutta-percha doll for some time,
composed it finally into the best correspondence she could effect, she
sat brooding for a while, with Alice's expression as it were frozen
upon it. Gradually the forms assumed melted away, and allowed her
still, solemn face to look out from behind them. The moment this
evanishment was complete, she rose and went to Alice, where she sat
staring into the fire, unconscious of the scrutiny she had been