“The air-life may not have been better or finer,” Peachy continued, “but, somehow, it seemed clearer and purer.  The earth’s such a cluttered place.  It’s so full of things.  You can hardly see it for the stuff that’s on it.  From above it seems beautiful, but near — .”

“Yet, it is on the earth that we must live — and that Angela must live,” Julia interpolated gently.

“But what is the use of our learning to walk?” Peachy demanded.

“To teach Angela how to walk and all the other girl-children that are coming to us.”

“But I am afraid,” Peachy said anxiously, that if Angela learned to walk, she would forget how to fly.”

“On the contrary,” Julia declared, “she would fly better for knowing how to walk, and walk better for knowing how to fly.”

“I don’t see it,” interposed Clara emphatically.  “I don’t see what we get out of walking or what Angela will get out of it.  Suppose we learned to walk?  The men would stop helping us along.  We’d lose the appeal of helplessness.”

“But what is there about what you call ‘the appeal of helplessness’ that makes it worth keeping?” Julia asked, smiling affectionately into Clara’s eyes.  “Why shouldn’t we lose it?”

“Why, because,” Clara exclaimed indignantly, “because — because — why, because,” she ended lamely.  Then, with one of her unexpected bursts of mental candor, “I’m sure I don’t know why,” she admitted, “except that we have always appealed to them for that reason.  Then again,” she took up her argument from another angle, “if we learn to walk, they won’t wait on us any more.  They may even stop giving us things.  As it is now, they’re really very generous to us.”

The others smiled with varying degrees of furtiveness.  Pete, as they all knew, could always placate an incensed Clara by offering her some loot of the homeward way:  a bunch of flowers, a handful of nuts, beautifully colored pebbles, shells with the iridescence still wet on them.  She soon tired of these toys, but she liked the excitement of the surprise.

“Generous to us!” Chiquita burst out — and this was as unexpected as Lulu’s face-about.  “Well, when you come to that, they’re never generous to us.  They make us pay for all they give us.  They seem generous — but they aren’t really — any more than we are.”

“They are far from generous,” said Peachy.  “They are ungenerous.  They’re tyrants.  They’re despots.  See how they took advantage of our innocence and ignorance of earth-conditions.”

“I protest.”  A note that they had never heard from Julia made steel of the thrilling melody of her voice.  “You must know that is not true!” she said in an accusing voice.  “Be fair to them!  Tell the truth to yourselves!  If they took advantage of our innocence and ignorance, it was we who tempted them to it in the first place.  As for our innocence and ignorance — you speak as, if they were beautiful or desirable.  We were innocent and ignorant of earth-conditions because we were too proud to learn about them, because we always assumed that we lowered ourselves by knowing anything about them.  Our mistake was that we learned to fly before we learned to walk.”