Letter LXX

Beloved: I think that small children see very much as animals must do:
just the parts of things which have a direct influence on their lives, and
no memory outside that. I remember the kindness or frowns of faces in
early days far more than the faces themselves: and it is quite a distinct
and later memory that I have of standing within a doorway and watching my
mother pass downstairs unconscious of my being there,--and then, for the
first time, studying her features and seeing in them a certain solitude
and distance which I had never before noticed:--I suppose because I had
never before thought of looking at her when she was not concerned with me.

It was this unobservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me
think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing
those who called, except generically as callers--people who kissed me,
and whom therefore I liked to see.

One, I remember, for no reason unless because she had a brown face, I
mistook from a distance for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room
where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture. And it was my earliest
conscious test of politeness, when I found out my mistake, not to cry over
it in the kind but very inferior presence to that one I had hoped for.

I suppose, also, that many sights which have no meaning to children go,
happily, quite out of memory; and that what our early years leave for us
in the mind's lavender are just the tit-bits of life, or the first blows
to our intelligence--things which did matter and mean much.