"What has made them so different?" the child pondered while sitting opposite them in the carriage. "Why don't they behave toward me as they did at first? Why does mamma avoid my eyes when I look at her? Why does he always try to joke when I'm around and make a silly of himself? They don't talk to me as they did yesterday or the day before yesterday. Their faces even seem different. Mamma's lips are so red she must have rouged them. I never saw her do that before. And he keeps frowning as though he were offended. Could I have said anything to annoy them? No, I haven't said a word. It cannot be on my account that they're so changed. Even their manner toward each other is not the same as it was. They behave as though they had been naughty and didn't dare confess. They don't chat the way they did yesterday, nor laugh. They're embarrassed, they're concealing something. They've got a secret between them that they don't want to tell me. I'm going to find it out. I must, I don't care what happens, I must. I believe I know what it is. It must be the same thing that grown-up people always shut me out from when they talk about it. It's what books speak of, and it comes in operas when the men and women on the stage stand singing face to face with their arms spread out, and embrace, and shove each other away. It must have something to do with my French governess, who behaved so badly with papa and was dismissed. All these things are connected. I feel they are, but I don't know how. Oh, to find it out, at last to find it out, that secret! To possess the key that opens all doors! Not to be a child any longer with everything kept hidden from one and always being held off and deceived. Now or never! I will tear it from them, that dreadful secret!" A deep furrow cut itself between the child's brows. He looked almost old as he sat in the carriage painfully cogitating this great mystery and never casting a single glance at the landscape, which was shading into all the delicate colors of the spring, the mountains in the freshened green of their pines, the valleys in the mistier greens of budding trees, shrubbery and young grass. All he had eyes for were the man and the woman on the seat opposite him, as though, with his hot gaze, as with an angling hook, he could snatch the secret from the shimmering depths of their eyes. Nothing gives so keen an edge to the intelligence as a passionate suspicion. All the possibilities of an immature mind are developed by a trail leading into obscurity. Sometimes it is only a single light door that keeps children out of the world that we call the real world, and a chance puff of wind may blow it open. Edgar, all at once, felt himself tangibly closer, closer than ever before, to the Unknown, the Great Secret. It was right next to him, still veiled and unriddled, but very near. It excited him, and it was this that lent him his sudden solemnity. Unconsciously he sensed that he was approaching the outer edges of childhood.