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and lordly world.”
Such love is not universal among the other sex, though men, in that humility which so adorns their natures, keep up the pleasing fiction that it is. As a general rule any little girl feels some glimmerings of emotion towards anything that can pass for a doll, but it does not follow that, when grown older, she will feel as ready an instinct toward every child.
Try it. Point out to a woman some bundle of blue-and-white or white-and-scarlet in some one's arms at the next street corner.
Ask her, “Do you love that baby?”
Not one woman in three will say promptly, “Yes.”
The others will hesitate, will bid you wait till they are nearer, till they can personally inspect the little thing and take an inventory of its traits; it may be dirty, too; it may be diseased.
Ah! but this is not to love children, and you might as well be a man. To love children is to love childhood, instinctively, at whatever distance, the first impulse being one of attraction, though it may be checked by later discoveries.
Unless your heart commands at least as long a range as your eye, it is not worth much.
The dearest saint in my calendar never entered a railway car that she did not
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