But time passes, and the child grows older. New ideas and requirements awaken in him; games and gaiety lose their interest. He grows pensive, pale, and thin, and he feels the need of suffering and tears. Irene remembered how, at the age of seven, she had suddenly experienced a great desire to fast during all the seven weeks of Lent. Pale, fragile child as she had been, such privation had weakened her terribly; but incredible as it may seem, with a strength gleaned Heaven knows from where, she had actually held out to the end! She remembered also certain religious pilgrimages in the small provincial town, near which she had sometimes passed the summer with her father. Many a time in the torrid heat of a sultry July day had she walked for four or five hours through clouds of dust, along a rough, uneven road, in a procession behind an ikon, returning home half dead with fatigue, but unable to sleep, through sheer religious exaltation. Her thoughts, too, wandered back to the neighbouring convent, whither she had often gone to pray, and where, having attended vespers, she had sometimes stood through the whole night in prayer, soaring on the wings of a religious ecstasy, and feeling no fatigue. Her young soul had needed these raptures, fasts, and prayers. It had needed also the food of legends, and the more wonderful, the more supernatural these legends the dearer had they grown to her imagination. Her mind had acknowledged no logic, and had needed none. Did not the same thing happen to the world in the Middle Ages, that period of Humanity’s later childhood? Christianity, or rather its rites and ceremonies (since its real meaning was unattainable to these children), was accepted with enthusiasm, because these rites and ceremonies exactly answered the requirements of the age: ecstasy, martyrdom, torture rapturously borne, naïve and lovely legends. Humanity would have no more of dolls and toys, and wrathfully destroyed the statues of the gods. Later on, in more recent times, those same people tenderly and lovingly collected the broken fragments of the statues and preserved them in their museums as cherished remembrances of childhood. It is thus that a grown-up man will pay a large sum for a broken doll, or for a faded coloured print that amused him in his early days. Just as modelling is the heritage of babyhood, so painting is the delight of childhood. First come naïve little drawings, like the work of the Primitives, in which the figures of saints of high religious rank are made twice as large as those of their inferiors, or like the pictures of Perugino and his school, in which the infant Christ is depicted wearing a coral ornament similar to those put round the necks of Italian children to save them from the evil eye!