THE PRINCESS POURQUOI
to hear; she understood what others wished to keep hidden. Therefore it came to pass that she was very lonely. She had a way of climbing affectionately up to the neck of some favored person, drawing down the head for a loving embrace, and then asking some terrible question, whereupon she was quickly put down on the floor and left alone. There she would sit, with so grieved a look in her big blue eyes that the next one who entered would pity the golden-haired baby, and would take her up, only to become a victim to some other unanswerable inquiry. When she was four and five, her questions were theological or philosophical.
"Why was she made at all, if she were as naughty as people said? Would n't it have been less trouble not to have made her, or
9
