Society can
never cease to be grateful for that tact and consideration--qualities
more often joined with childish intuition and perception than with
matured observation--that they owe to it; and the most accomplished
man or woman of the great world might take a lesson from this little
audience who receive from their lips the lie they feel too palpable,
with round-eyed complacency, or outwardly accept as moral and genuine
the hollow sentiment they have overheard rehearsed in private for their
benefit.
It was not strange therefore that the little people of the Indian Spring
school knew perhaps more of the real relations of Cressy McKinstry to
her admirers than the admirers themselves. Not that this knowledge was
outspoken--for children rarely gossip in the grown-up sense--or even
communicable by words intelligent to the matured intellect. A whisper,
a laugh that often seemed vague and unmeaning, conveyed to each other
a world of secret significance, and an apparently senseless burst of
merriment in which the whole class joined and that the adult critic set
down to "animal spirits"--a quality much more rare with children than
generally supposed--was only a sympathetic expression of some discovery
happily oblivious to older preoccupation.
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