Yes, it ought to have been a jolly party, but it came about twenty years too late, and the children, I had almost added, were about twenty years too old. Instead of forgetting everything else in the whirl and clamour of play and dancing, they were, it seemed to me, too busy registering the impressions to enjoy themselves. One of them, a child of eleven, was already smitten with a passion for the _mot juste_. “My tongue,” she told me gravely, “is like a cloud”; and, later, “a marigold is like a circus.” She had a crushing word for a comrade who was looking at herself in a mirror. “But you don’t _really_ look as nice as you do in the looking-glass!” The other children did not seem much better, and I stood forlornly in their midst, as a child stands among the creased trouser-legs of its elders, until I saw a scared little face in a corner apart from the rest. “Why aren’t you playing?” I asked. The child looked me straight in the face, and burst into a thousand tears. At least here was something young, something not wholly wise. We sat together, exchanging grave confidences all the evening. Possibly this is a queer way in which to start an article on common sense, but there is more than madness in my method, for I feel assured that the children have derived their new wisdom—a senseless wisdom, a wisdom of facts—from their absurd parents. The latest creed, the belief that comfort for the masses prevents remorse in the individual, may be well enough in its way, but it creates a very bad atmosphere in which to bring up children. They are taught that life is an agglomeration of facts, and no sort of miracle, and by learning these facts like little parrots they lose the whole thrill and adventure of life. They do not go out to kill dragons, because they know that there are no dragons there. Chivalry survived with children long after common sense had killed it as dead as mutton in the adult mind. But now they, too, have found it out, and there are only a few silly poets and mad lovers to keep the memory of Quixote green. What are these facts by which we are to guide our lives, of which, indeed, our lives are to consist? One of the simplest, one that has come to have the force of a proverbial expression, is the fact that two and two make four, and this is one of the first things we teach our children.