How can I describe that except by saying that
instead of growing used to them--and it's a marvel for a governess:
I call the sisterhood to witness!--I made constant fresh discoveries.
There was one direction, assuredly, in which these discoveries stopped:
deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy's conduct at school.
It had been promptly given me, I have noted, to face that mystery without
a pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the truth to say that--without
a word--he himself had cleared it up. He had made the whole charge absurd.
My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose flush of his innocence:
he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean school world,
and he had paid a price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense
of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part
of the majority--which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters--
turn infallibly to the vindictive.
Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault,
and it never made Miles a muff) that kept them--how shall I
express it?--almost impersonal and certainly quite unpunishable.
They were like the cherubs of the anecdote, who had--
morally, at any rate--nothing to whack! I remember feeling
with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no history.
We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in this
beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive,
yet extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature
of his age I have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day.
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