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 is perfect) “chaff” his wife and at the same time love her more deeply than he ever did in the merely reverential days of courtship.

In truth Heaven does lie about us in our infancy (let us note in passing, but to scorn it, the paranomasia of the wretched cynic who added “and we return the compliment during the rest of our lives”). But the child’s Heaven, like the child’s earth, is a mixture of the mysterious and the definite, the practical and the absurd. The child himself, set between the mysterious and the absurd, is all the while severely practical. He wants to know how creation was managed; he wants (in the words of that half-forgotten Amer­ican book, Helen's Babies) to see the wheels go round; he wants to know who made the trees, ships, life-guards­