The Circus was a nursery. The blue evening sky was closed down, a radiant roof. Everywhere were the toys. Now it seemed that balls were danced in the air; now that someone sang or rang bells; now that some new game was suddenly proposed and greeted with a shout of joy. The children filled the Circus; the policemen were toy policemen, the omnibuses toy omnibuses, the theatres toy theatres.
On every side of him Peter felt the kindliness, the helplessness, the pathos of his vision. They were children; he was a child; the world was only a nursery, after all. The sense of his earlier indignation had left him. It seemed now that anger and condemnation, whether of Robsart, or Temple and his friends, or of himself, were absurd. They were all children together, children in their ignorance, their helplessness, children in their love for one another, their generosity, and their hope.
For the first time in his life that sense of disappointment that had been for so long a stumbling-block to all his effort left him. He felt as though, like Pilgrim, he had suddenly dropped his pack. Children in the nursery--the lot of them. No place in this world for high indignation, for bitterness, for denunciation.
The injustice, the ill-humour, the passions of life were like the quarrels in children's play; the wisest man alive knew just as much as his nursery-walls could show him.
The new world? Perhaps. The progress of the world? Perhaps. Meanwhile, there were nursery-tea, a game of pirates, and a fairy-tale by the fire ... and after it all, that sound, dreamless sleep that only children know. Would one wake in the morning and find that one was leaving the nursery for school? Who could tell? No one returned with any story....
Meanwhile, there was enough to do to help in keeping the nursery in order, in seeing that the weaker babies were not trodden upon, in making sure that no one cried himself to sleep.
Anger and condemnation would never be possible again; no, nor would he expect the Millennium.
Lucy Moon was the daughter of the Reverend Stephen Moon, Rector of Little Hawkesworth in North Yorkshire. She was twenty-one years of age, and pretty. She was so pretty indeed that she reminded one young man in Hawkesworth of "a cornfield under a red moon," and the Reverend Simon Laud, to whom she was engaged, thought of her privately as his "golden goddess," from which it will be seen that she had yellow hair and a peach-like complexion.