By the time Boodles was sixteen she was shaped and polished. Weevil had done what he could; not much, for the poor old thing was neither learned nor rich; and she had gone to Tavistock, where various arts had been crammed into her brain, all mixed up together like the ingredients of a patent pill. Boodles knew a good deal for seventeen; but Nature and Dartmoor had taught her more than the school-mistress. She was a fresh and fragrant child, with no unhealthy fancies; loving everything that was clean and pretty; loathing spiders, and creeping things, and filth in general; and longing ardently already to win for herself a name and a soul a little higher than the beetles. They were presumptuous longings for a child of passion, who did not know her parents, or anything about her origin beyond the fact that she had been thrown out in a bundle of fern, and taken in and cared for by Abel Cain Weevil.
At the tender age of fourteen Boodles received her love-wound. It was down by the Tavy, where the water swirls round pebbles and rattles them against its rocks below Sandypark. Her love-affair was idyllic, and therefore dangerous, because the idyllic state bears the same resemblance to rough and brutal life as the fairy-tale bears to the true story of that life. The tales begin with "once upon a time," and end with "they lived happily ever after." The idyllic state begins in the same way, but ends, either with "they parted with tears and kisses and never saw each other again," or "they married and were miserable ever afterwards." Only children can blow idyll-bubbles which will float for a time. Elderly people try, but they only make themselves ridiculous, and the bubbles will not form. People of thirty or over cannot play at fairy-tales. When they try they become as fantastic a sight as an old gentleman wearing a paper hat and blowing a penny trumpet. Shakespeare, who knew everything about human nature that men can know, made his Romeo and Juliet children, and ended their idyll as such things must end. Customs have changed since; even children are beginning to understand that life cannot be made a fairy-tale; and Romeo prefers the football field to sighing beneath a school-girl's balcony; and Juliet twists up her hair precociously and runs amok with a hockey-stick.