Nor is the dark child lacking in variety.  His radiant eyes range from a brown so bright that it looks golden in the light, to a brown so dark that it barely defines the pupil.  So is his hair various, answering the sun with unsuspected touches, not of gold but of bronze.  And his cheek is not invariably pale.  A dusky rose sometimes lurks there with such an effect of vitality as you will hardly get from the shallower pink of the flaxened haired.  And the suggestion is that of late summer, the colour of wheat almost ready for the harvest, and darker, redder flowers—­poppies and others—­than come in Spring.

The dark eyes, besides, are generally brighter—­they shelter a more liquid light than the blue or grey.  Southern eyes have generally most beautiful whites.  And as to the charm of the childish figure, there is usually an infantine slenderness in the little Southener that is at least as young and sweet as the round form of the blond child.  And yet the painters of Italy would have none of it.  They rejected the dusky brilliant pale little Italians all about them; they would have none but flaxen-haired children, and they would have nothing that was slim, nothing that was thin, nothing that was shadowy.  They rejoiced in much fair flesh, and in all possible freshness.  So it was in fair Flanders as well as in dark Italy.  But so it was not in Spain.  The Pyrenees seemed to interrupt the tradition.  And as Murillo saw the charm of dark heads, and the innocence of dark eyes, so did one English painter.  Reynolds painted young dark hair as tenderly as the youngest gold.

REAL CHILDHOOD

The world is old because its history is made up of successive childhoods and of their impressions.  Your hours when you were six were the enormous hours of the mind that has little experience and constant and quick forgetfulness.  Therefore when your mother’s visitor held you so long at his knee, while he talked to her the excited gibberish of the grown-up, he little thought what he forced upon you; what the things he called minutes really were, measured by a mind unused; what passive and then what desperate weariness he held you to by his slightly gesticulating hands that pressed some absent-minded caress, rated by you at its right value, in the pauses of his anecdotes.  You, meanwhile, were infinitely tired of watching the play of his conversing moustache.

Indeed, the contrast of the length of contemporary time (this pleonasm is inevitable) is no small mystery, and the world has never had the wit fully to confess it.

You remembered poignantly the special and singular duration of some such space as your elders, perhaps, called half-an-hour—­so poignantly that you spoke of it to your sister, not exactly with emotion, but still as a dreadful fact of life.  You had better instinct than to complain of it to the talkative, easy-living, occupied people, who had the management of the world in their hands—­your seniors.  You remembered the duration of some such separate half-hour so well that you have in fact remembered it until now, and so now, of course, will never forget it.