I waited and waited, and the days, as they elapsed, took something from my consternation². A very few of them, in fact, passing, in constant sight of my pupils, without a fresh incident, sufficed to give to grievous fancies and even to odious³ memories a kind of brush of the sponge. I have spoken of the surrender to their extraordinary childish grace as a thing I could actively⁵ cultivate, and it may be imagined if I neglected now to address myself to this source for whatever it would yield. Stranger than I can express, certainly, was the effort to struggle against my new lights; it would doubtless have been, however, a greater tension still had it not been so frequently successful. I used to wonder how my little charges could help guessing that I thought strange things about them; and the circumstances that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more interesting. Putting things at the worst, at all events, as in meditation⁶ I so often did, any clouding of their innocence⁷ could only be—blameless and foredoomed as they were—a reason the more for taking risks. There were moments when, by an irresistible⁸ impulse, I found myself catching⁹ them up and pressing them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to say to myself: “What will they think of that? Doesn’t it betray too much?” It would have been easy to get into a sad, wild tangle¹⁰ about how much I might betray; but the real account, I feel, of the hours of peace that I could still enjoy was that the immediate¹¹ charm of my companions was a

分享到：