As she stood in the nursery waiting for her cousins’ return she
sensed she could write a scene like the one by the fountain and
she could include a hidden observer like herself. She could
imagine herself hurrying down now to her bedroom, to a clean
block of lined paper and her marbled, Bakelite fountain pen. She
could see the simple sentences, the accumulating telepathic
symbols, unfurling at the nib’s end. She could write the scene
three times over, from three points of view; her excitement was
in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous
struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of
these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need
not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show
separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea
that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness
and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and
misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the
simple truth that other p