Little Girls I Have Met

Perhaps some reader who does not know a little girl her psychology,
after that account of the Alvediston maidie who presented me with a
flower with an arch expression on her face just bordering on a mocking
smile, will say, "What a sophisticated child to be sure!" He would be
quite wrong unless we can say that the female child is born
sophisticated, which sounds rather like a contradiction in terms. That
appearance of sophistication, common in little girls even in a remote
rustic village hidden away among the Wiltshire downs, is implicit in,
and a quality of the child's mind--the _female_ child, it will be
understood--and is the first sign of the flirting instinct which shows
itself as early as the maternal one. This, we know, appears as soon as
a child is able to stand on its feet, perhaps even before it quits the
cradle. It seeks to gratify itself by mothering something, even an
inanimate something, so that it is as common to put a doll in a baby-
child's hands as it is to put a polished cylindrical bit of ivory--I
forget the name of it--in its mouth. The child grows up nursing this
image of itself, whether with or without a wax face, blue eyes and tow-
coloured hair, and if or when the unreality of the doll begins to spoil
its pleasure, it will start mothering something with life in it--a
kitten for preference, and if no kitten, or puppy or other such
creature easy to be handled or cuddled, is at hand, it will take kindly
to any mild-mannered old gentleman of its circle.

It is just these first instinctive impulses of the girl-child, combined
with her imitativeness and wonderful precocity, which make her so
fascinating. But do they think? They do, but this first early thinking
does not make them self-conscious as does their later thinking, to the
spoiling of their charm. The thinking indeed begins remarkably early. I
remember one child, a little five-year-old and one of my favourites,
climbing to my knee one day and exhibiting a strangely grave face.
"Doris, what makes you look so serious?" I asked. And after a few
moments of silence, during which she appeared to be thinking hard, she
startled me by asking me what was the use of living, and other
questions which it almost frightened me to hear from those childish
innocent lips. Yet I have seen this child grow up to womanhood--a quite
commonplace conventional woman, who when she has a child of her own of
five would be unspeakably shocked to hear from it the very things she
herself spoke at that tender age. And if I were to repeat to her now
the words she spoke (the very thought of Byron in his know-that-
whatever-thou-hast-been-'Twere-something-better-not-to-be poem) she
would not believe it.

It is, however, rare for the child