with her sweetest smile and bugloss eyes aglow with ineffable
happiness. And now that we are far apart my loveliest memory of her is
as she appeared then. I would not spoil that lovely image by going back
to look at her again. Three years! It was said of Lewis Carroll that he
ceased to care anything about his little Alices when they had come to
the age of ten. Seven is my limit: they are perfect then: but in Mab's
case the peculiar exquisite charm could hardly have lasted beyond the
age of six.




XVIII

FRECKLES


My meeting with Freckles only served to confirm me in the belief,
almost amounting to a conviction, that the female of our species
reaches its full mental development at an extraordinarily early age
compared to that of the male. In the male the receptive and elastic or
progressive period varies greatly; but judging from the number of cases
one meets with of men who have continued gaining in intellectual power
to the end of their lives, in spite of physical decay, it is reasonable
to conclude that the stationary individuals are only so because of the
condition of their lives having been inimical. In fact, stagnation
strikes us as an unnatural condition of mind. The man who dies at fifty
or sixty or seventy, after progressing all his life, doubtless would,
if he had lived a lustrum or a decade longer, have attained to a still
greater height. "How disgusting it is," cried Ruskin, when he had