Explore "That Pretty Person" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one significant lesson -- so it seems -- was learnt, which has outlived controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue -- an interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. This is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of progress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more than resignation -- a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their transitoriness.
What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world, for childhood. Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now hold, perhaps, that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions.