It is a light from the
right or from the left that marks an elderly face with minute shadows.
And you must place a child in such a light, in order to see the finishing
and parting caress that infancy has given to his face. The down will
then be found even on the thinnest and clearest skin of the middle red of
his cheek. His hair, too, is imponderably fine, and his nails are not
much harder than petals.
To return to the child in January. It is his month for the laying up of
dreams. No one can tell whether it is so with all children, or even with
a majority; but with some children, of passionate fancy, there occurs now
and then a children's dance, or a party of any kind, which has a charm
and glory mingled with uncertain dreams. Never forgotten, and yet never
certainly remembered as a fact of this life, is such an evening. When
many and many a later pleasure, about the reality of which there never
was any kind of doubt, has been long forgotten, that evening--as to which
all is doubt--is impossible to forget. In a few years it has become so
remote that the history of Greece derives antiquity from it. In later
years it is still doubtful, still a legend.
The child never asked how much was fact. It was always so immeasurably
long ago that the sweet party happened--if indeed it happened. It had so
long taken its place in that past wherein lurks all the antiquity of the
world.
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