She looked at me and then away, and her beautiful blue intelligent eyes told me plainly that she did not, and that she felt baffled and worried. After an interval she pointed to the hedge. "Look at the leaves," she said. "I could go and count a hundred leaves, couldn't I? Well, would that be a hundred years?" And no further could we get, since I could not make out just what the question meant. At first it looked as if she thought of the leaves as an illustration--or a symbol; and then that she had failed to grasp the idea of time, or that it had slipped from her, and she had fallen back, as it were, to the notion that a hundred meant a hundred objects, which you could see and feel. There appeared to be no way out of the puzzle-dom into which we had both got, so that it came as a relief to both of us when she heard her mother calling--calling her back into a world she could understand. I believe that when we penetrate to the real mind of girl children we find a strong likeness in them even when they appear to differ as widely from one another as adults do. The difference in the little ones is less in disposition and character than in unlikeness due to unconscious imitation. They take their mental colour from their surroundings. The red men of America are the gravest people on the globe, and their children are like them when with them; but this unnatural gravity is on the surface and is a mask which drops or fades off when they assemble together out of sight and hearing of their elders. In like manner our little ones have masks to fit the character of the homes they are bred in.