For example, a reader of the foregoing notes may say: "If you really
find all this beauty and charm and fascination you tell us in some
little girls, you must love them. You can't admire and take delight in
them as you can in a piece of furniture, or tapestry, or a picture or
statue or a stone of great brilliancy and purity of colour, or in any
beautiful inanimate object, without that emotion coming in to make
itself part of and one with your admiration. You can't, simply because
a child is a human being, and we do not want to lose sight of the being
we love. So long as the love lasts, the eye would follow its steps
because--we are what we are, and a mere image in the mind doesn't
satisfy the heart. Love is never satisfied, and asks not for less and
less each day but for more--always for more. Then, too, love is
credulous; it believes and imagines all things and, like all emotions,
it pushes reason and experience aside and sticks to the belief that
these beautiful qualities cannot die and leave nothing behind: they are
not on the surface only; they have their sweet permanent roots in the
very heart and centre of being."

That, I suppose, is the best argument on the other side, and if you
look straight at it for six seconds, you will see it dissolve like a
lump of sugar in a tumbler of water and disappear under your very eyes.
For the fact remains that when I listen to the receding footsteps of my
little charmer, the sigh that escapes me expresses something of relief
as well as regret. The signs of change have perhaps not yet appeared,
and I wish not to see them. Good-bye, little one, we part in good time,
and may we never meet again! Undoubtedly one loses something, but it
cannot balance the gain. The loss in any case was bound to come, and
had I waited for it no gain would have been possible. As it is, I am
like that man in _The Pilgrim's Progress_, by some accounted mad,