Oh, it was a trap⁠—not designed, but deep⁠—to my imagination, to my delicacy, perhaps to my vanity; to whatever, in me, was most excitable. The best way to picture it all is to say that I was off my guard. They gave me so little trouble⁠—they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate⁠—but even this with a dim disconnectedness⁠—as to how the rough future (for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise them. They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet, as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right, would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that, in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park. It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness⁠—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.