“O, everything. The wind, and the sky, and the sea, and the smell of the flowers. Do look at that sea-bird. His wings are like the barb of a terrible arrow. How he goes undulating, neck and body, up and down as he flies. I never felt before that a bird moves his wings. It always looked as if the wings flew with the bird. But I see the effort in him.” “An easy effort, though, I should certainly think.” “No doubt. But I see that he chooses and means to fly, and so does it. It makes one almost reconciled to the idea of wings. Do angels really have wings, papa?” “It is generally so represented, I think, in the Bible. But whether it is meant as a natural fact about them, is more than I take upon me to decide. For one thing, I should have to examine whether in simple narrative they are ever represented with them, as, I think, in records of visions they are never represented without them. But wings are very beautiful things, and I do not exactly see why you should need reconciling to them.” Connie gave a little shrug of her shoulders. “I don’t like the notion of them growing out at my shoulder-blades. And however would you get on your clothes? If you put them over your wings, they would be of no use, and would, besides, make you hump-backed; and if you did not, everything would have to be buttoned round the roots of them. You could not do it yourself, and even on Wynnie I don’t think I could bear to touch the things--I don’t mean the feathers, but the skinny, folding-up bits of them.” I laughed at her fastidious fancy. “You want to fly, I suppose?” I said. “O, yes; I should like that.” “And you don’t want to have wings?” “Well, I shouldn’t mind the wings exactly; but however would one be able to keep them nice?” “There you go; starting from one thing to another, like a real bird already. When you can’t answer one thing, off to another, and, from your new perch on the hawthorn, talk as if you were still on the topmost branch of the lilac!” “O, yes, papa! That’s what I’ve heard you say to mamma twenty times.” “And did I ever say to your mamma anything but the truth? or to you either, you puss?” I had not yet discovered that when I used this epithet to my Connie, she always thought she had gone too far. She looked troubled. I hastened to relieve her. “When women have wings,” I said, “their logic will be good.” “How do you make that out, papa?” she asked, a little re-assured. “Because then every shadow of feeling that turns your speech aside from the straight course will be recognised in that speech; the whole utterance will be instinct not only with the meaning of what you are thinking, but with the reflex of the forces in you that make the utterance take this or that shape; just as to a perfect palate, the source and course of a stream would be revealed in every draught of its water. “I have just a glimmering of your meaning, papa. Would you like to have wings?”