She liked to hear that
because she greatly admired her mother. She knew that she, Nancy Ross,
was beautiful; she knew that clothes were of an immense importance; she
knew that other children were unpleasant. For the rest, she was neither
extravagantly glad nor extravagantly sorry. She preserved a fine
indifference.... And yet, although, here my story may seem to
matter-of-fact persons to take a turn towards the fantastic, this was
not quite all. Nancy herself, dimly and yet uneasily, was aware that
there was something else.
She was not a little girl who believed in fairies or witches or the
"bogey man," or anything indeed that she could not see. She inherited
from her mother a splendid confidence in the reality, the solid,
unquestioned reality of all concrete and tangible things. She had been
presented once with a fine edition of "Grimm's Fairy Tales," an edition
with coloured pictures and every allure. She had turned its pages with a
look of incredulous amazement. "What," she seemed to say--she was then
aged three and a half--"are these absurd things that you are telling me?
People aren't like that.
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