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what you meant when you said the other day that thoughts were better than things."
Walter hesitated. The question was an inclined plane leading to unknown depths of argument!
"See, Walter," said Molly, "here is a _narcissus_--a pheasant's eye: tell me the thought that is better than this thing!"
How troublesome girls were when they asked questions!
"Well," he said, not very logically, "that narcissus has nothing but air around it; my thought of the narcissus has mind around it."
"Then a thought is better than a thing because it has thought round about it?"
"Well, yes"
"Did the thing come there of itself, or did it come of God's thinking?"
"Of God's thinking."
"And God is always the same?"
"Yes."
"Then God's thought is about the narcissus still--and the narcissus is better than your thought of it!"
Walter was silent.
"I should so like to understand!" said Molly. "If you have a thought more beautiful than the narcissus, Walter, I should like to see it! Only if I could see it, it would be a thing, would it not? A thing must be a think before it be a thing. A thing is a ripe think, and must be better than a think--except it lose something in ripening--which may very well be with man's thoughts, but hardly with God's! I will keep in front of the things, and look through them to the thoughts behind them. I want to understand! If a thing were not a thought first, it would not be worth anything! And everything has to be thought about, else we don't see what it is! I haven't got it quite!"
Instead of replying, Walter rose, and they walked to the house side by side in silence.
"Could a thought be worth anything that God had never cared to think?" said Molly to herself as they went.

CHAPTER V
.
FLUTTERBIES.
Mr. Colman and his adopted daughter were fast friends--so fast and so near that they could talk together about Walter, though but the adoptive brother of the one, and the real son of the other. Richard had inherited, apparently, his wife's love to Molly, and added to it his own; but their union had its root in the perfect truthfulness of the two. Real approximation, real union must ever be in proportion to mutual truthfulness. It was quite after the usual fashion, therefore, between them, when Molly began, to tell her father about the conversation she had had with Walter.
"What first made you think, Molly, of such a difference between thoughts and things?" asked Mr. Colman.
"I know quite well," answered Molly. "You remember our visit to your old school-friend, Mr. Dobson?"
"Of course; perfectly."
Mr. Dobson was a worthy clergyman, doing his weary best in a rural parish.
"And you remember Mrs. Evermore?"
"Yes."
"You thought her name a funny one; but you said it ought to have been _'Nevermore,'_ because she seemed never to get any further!"
"Come, come, Molly! that won't do! It was you, not I, that said such a spiteful thing!" "It was true any way!" answered Molly; "and you agreed with me; so if I said it first, you said it last! Well, I had to study this Mrs. Evermore. From morning to night she was evermore on the hunt after new fancies. She watched for them, stalked them, followed them like a boy with a butterfly-net She caught them too, of the sort she wanted, plentifully. But none ever came to anything, so far as I could see. She never did anything with one of them. Whatever she caught had a cage to itself, where it sat on 'the all-alone-stone.' Every other moment, while you and Mr. Dobson were talking, she would cry 'oh! oh! o--o--oh!' and pull out her note-book, which was the cork-box in which she pinned her butterflies. She must have had a whole museum of ideas! The most accidental resemblance between words would suffice to start one: after it she would go, catch it, pin it down, and call it a correspondence. Now and then a very pretty notion would fall to her net, and often a silly one; but all were equally game to her. I found her amusing and interesting for two days, but then began to see she only led nothing nowhere. She was touchy, and jealous, and said things that disgusted me; never did anything for anybody; and though she hunted religious ideas most, never seemed to imagine they could have anything to do with her life. It was only the fineness of a good thought even that she seemed to prize. She would startle you any moment by an exclamation of delight at some religious fancy or sentimentality, and down it most go in her book, but it went no further than her book: she was just as common as before, vulgar even, in her judgments of motives and actions. She seemed made for a refined