“I used to think, too, if I only could see when my eyes were shut everything would appear different. So I would lie pretending to be asleep, and then suddenly jerk my eyes open, thinking I should catch everything strangely changed. But there invariably was the cupboard and the dressing-table, and all the familiar objects just as they had been. I endowed them with a sense of mockery at my efforts, and of being immeasurably subtler than I. So I would lie quite still, and stealthily lift a lid. But no, they were always the same. This did not convince me they did not move. On the contrary, I would say to myself with a sense of vexed despair, ‘I shall never, never know what things look like when I’m not seeing them.’” Clare said, “Mummie believes, you know, that if you think about a thing a great deal--something, I mean, that isn’t really alive, as we are--that you endow it with a sort of image of life, and that strange things can happen in this way. Gems that have been thought magical, and idols that have been worshipped for centuries, have their being. That is why she would never like to have a Buddha in her house; she would think it would feel neglected. It would suffer and be cold, and its suffering would stream from it, and affect others. Besides, the wrongfulness it would be, to treat something that a great many people think sacred, merely as an ornament, or a curiosity.” “I had a brooch once,” said Miss Ross, “that had a life of its own. It had many other things to do beside being my brooch, that was quite certain. I first found out it was a person by its evidently hearing what I said. It was a gold brooch, fashioned like an instep, or a curved willow leaf, and the pin worked on a principle evolved ages ago by some primitive race. ‘Never,’ said I one morning, in a moment of impatience--‘never will I again use such a clumsy pin as this. It tears lace, and once inserted in any material it is almost impossible to dislodge.’ I was pricked to the bone. “This brooch would go away for days to attend to its own business; and when I’d given up looking for it, there I would find it on my pincushion, looking me in the eye. Even my maid, a most unimaginative woman, appeared to be conscious of its ways. “‘I see your brooch has come back, Miss,’ she would say. Finally it chose a worthier home. “I was travelling with my parents in Italy, driving through Tuscany in our private coach. We stayed for some weeks in Florence, and during that time I used to attend Mass in one of the great churches there. I became acquainted with the old priest who officiated. One day as I was leaving the church, he said to me, ‘Signora, have you seen the gift that has been made? The blue robe that has been presented to the Madonna?’