For some smiles are like the ruddiness of
certain apples, which is owing to a centipede, or other creeping
thing, coiled up at the heart of them. Only her worm had a face and
shape the very image of her own; and she looked so simpering, and
mawkish, and self-conscious, and silly, that she made the wise woman
feel rather sick.
Not that the child was a fool. Had she been, the wise woman would
have only pitied and loved her, instead of feeling sick when she
looked at her. She had very fair abilities, and were she once but
made humble, would be capable not only of doing a good deal in time,
but of beginning at once to grow to no end. But, if she were not
made humble, her growing would be to a mass of distorted shapes all
huddled together; so that, although the body she now showed might
grow up straight and well-shaped and comely to behold, the new body
that was growing inside of it, and would come out of it when she
died, would be ugly, and crooked this way and that, like an aged
hawthorn that has lived hundreds of years exposed upon all sides to
salt sea-winds.
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