On the same morning, or a couple of days later, on the terrace:
	"Mais va donc jouer avec lui," said Mlle Larivière, pushing
	Ada, whose young hips disjointedly jerked from the shock.
	"Don’t let your cousin se morfondre when the weather is so
50.05	fine. Take him by the hand. Go and show him the white lady
	in your favorite lane, and the mountain, and the great oak."
	Ada turned to him with a shrug. The touch of her cold
	fingers and damp palm and the self-conscious way she tossed
	back her hair as they walked down the main avenue of the park
50.10	made him self-conscious too, and under the pretext of picking
	up a fir cone he disengaged his hand. He threw the cone at a
	woman of marble bending over a stamnos but only managed
	to frighten a bird that perched on the brim of her broken
	jar.
50.15	"There is nothing more banal in the world," said Ada, "than
	pitching stones at a hawfinch."
	"Sorry," said Van, "I did not intend to scare that bird. But
	then, I’m not a country lad, who knows a cone from a stone.
	What games, au fond, does she expect us to play?"
50.20	"Je l’ignore," replied Ada. "I really don’t care very much how

[ 50 ]

	her poor mind works. Cache-cache, I suppose, or climbing trees."
	"Oh, I’m good at that," said Van, "in fact, I can even
	brachiate."
	"No," she said, "we are going to play my games. Games I
51.05	have invented all by myself. Games Lucette, I hope, will be
	able to play next year with me, the poor pet. Come, let us start.
	The present series belongs to the shadow-and-shine group, two
	of which I’m going to show you."
	"I see," said Van.
51.10	"You will in a moment," rejoined the pretty prig. "First of
	all we must find a nice stick."
	"Look," said Van, still smarting a bit, "there goes another
	haw-haw finch."
	By then they had reached the rond-point—a small arena en-
51.15	circled by flowerbeds and jasmine bushes in heavy bloom. Over-
	head the arms of a linden stretched toward those of an oak, like
	a green-spangled beauty flying to meet her strong father hang-
	ing by his feet from the trapeze. Even then did we both under-
	stand that kind of heavenly stuff, even then.
51.20	"Something rather acrobatic about those branches up there,
	no?" he said, pointing.
	"Yes," she answered. "I discovered it long ago. The teil is the
	flying Italian lady, and the old oak aches, the old lover aches,
	but still catches her every time" (impossible to reproduce the
51.25	right intonation while rendering the entire sense—after eight
	decades!—but she did say something extravagant, something
	quite out of keeping with her tender age as they looked up and
	then down).
	Looking down and gesturing with a sharp green stake bor-
51.30	rowed from the peonies, Ada explained the first game.
	The shadows of leaves on the sand were variously interrupted
	by roundlets of live light. The player chose his roundlet—the
	best, the brightest he could find—and firmly outlined it with
	the point of his stick; whereupon the yellow round light would

[ 51 ]

	appear to grow convex like the brimming surface of some golden
	dye. Then the player delicately scooped out the earth with his
	stick or fingers within the roundlet. The level of that gleaming
	infusion de tilleul would magically sink in its goblet of earth and
52.05	finally dwindle to one precious drop. That player won who
	made the most goblets in, say, twenty minutes.
	Van asked suspiciously if that was all.
	No, it was not. As she dug a firm little circle around a par-
	ticularly fine goldgout, Ada squatted and moved, squatting,
52.10	with her black hair falling over her ivory-smooth moving knees
	while her haunches and hands worked, one hand holding the
	stick, the other brushing back bothersome strands of hair. A
	gentle breeze suddenly eclipsed her fleck. When that occurred,
	the player lost one point, even if the leaf or the cloud hastened
52.15	to move aside.
	All right. What was the other game?
	The other game (in a singsong voice) might seem a little
	more complicated. To play it properly one had to wait for p.m.
	to provide longer shadows. The player—
52.20	"Stop saying ‘the player.’ It is either you or me."
	"Say, you. You outline my shadow behind me on the sand.
	I move. You outline it again. Then you mark out the next
	boundary (handing him the stick). If I now move back—"
	"You know," said Van, throwing the stick away, "personally
52.25	I think these are the most boring and stupid games anybody has
	ever invented, anywhere, any time, a.m. or p.m."
	She said nothing but her nostrils narrowed. She retrieved the
	stick and stuck it back, furiously, where it belonged, deep into
	the loam next to a grateful flower to which she looped it with
52.30	a silent nod. She walked back to the house. He wondered if
	her walk would be more graceful when she grew up.
	"I’m a rude brutal boy, please forgive me," he said.
	She inclined her head without looking back. In token of
	partial reconciliation, she showed him two sturdy hooks passed

[ 52 ]

	into iron rings on two tulip-tree trunks between which, before
	she was born, another boy, also Ivan, her mother’s brother, used
	to sling a hammock in which he slept in midsummer when the
	nights became really sultry—this was the latitude of Sicily, after
53.05	all.
	"A splendid idea," said Van. "By the way, do fireflies burn
	one if they fly into you? I’m just asking. Just a city boy’s silly
	question."
	She showed him next where the hammock—a whole set of
53.10	hammocks, a canvas sack full of strong, soft nets—was stored:
	this was in the corner of a basement toolroom behind the lilacs,
	the key was concealed in this hole here which last year was
	stuffed by the nest of a bird—no need to identify it. A pointer
	of sunlight daubed with greener paint a long green box where
53.15	croquet implements were kept; but the balls had been rolled
	down the hill by some rowdy children, the little Erminins, who
	were now Van’s age and had grown very nice and quiet.
	"As we all are at that age," said Van and stooped to pick up
	a curved tortoiseshell comb—the kind that girls use to hold up
53.20	their hair behind; he had seen one, exactly like that, quite re-
	cently, but when, in whose hairdo?
	"One of the maids," said Ada. "That tattered chapbook must
	also belong to her, Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical
	romance by a pastor."
53.25	"Playing croquet with you," said Van, "should be rather like
	using flamingoes and hedgehogs."
	"Our reading lists do not match," replied Ada. "That Palace
	in Wonderland was to me the kind of book everybody so often
	promised me I would adore, that I developed an insurmountable
53.30	prejudice toward it. Have you read any of Mlle Larivière’s
	stories? Well, you will. She thinks that in some former Hindooish
	state she was a boulevardier in Paris; and writes accordingly.
	We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage,
	but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne

[ 53 ]

	which is really an elm." Did he like elms? Did he know Joyce’s
	poem about the two washerwomen? He did, indeed. Did he like
	it? He did. In fact he was beginning to like very much arbors
	and ardors and Adas. They rhymed. Should he mention it?
54.05	"And now," she said, and stopped, staring at him.
	"Yes?" he said, "and now?"
	"Well, perhaps, I ought not to try to divert you—after you
	trampled upon those circles of mine; but I’m going to relent
	and show you the real marvel of Ardis Manor; my larvarium,
54.10	it’s in the room next to mine" (which he never saw, never—
	how odd, come to think of it!).
	She carefully closed a communicating door as they entered
	into what looked like a glorified rabbitry at the end of a marble-
	flagged hall (a converted bathroom, as it transpired). In spite
54.15	of the place’s being well aired, with the heraldic stained-glass
	windows standing wide open (so that one heard the screeching
	and catcalls of an undernourished and horribly frustrated bird
	population), the smell of the hutches—damp earth, rich roots,
	old greenhouse and maybe a hint of goat—was pretty appalling.
54.20	Before letting him come nearer, Ada fiddled with little latches
	and grates, and a sense of great emptiness and depression re-
	placed the sweet fire that had been consuming Van since the
	beginning of their innocent games on that day.
	"Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe (I’m crazy about everything
54.25	that crawls)," she said.
	"Personally," said Van, "I rather like those that roll up in a
	muff when you touch them—those that go to sleep like old
	dogs."
	"Oh, they don’t go to sleep, quelle idée, they swoon, it’s a
54.30	little syncope," explained Ada frowning. "And I imagine it may
	be quite a little shock for the younger ones."
	"Yes, I can well imagine that, too. But I suppose one gets
	used to it, by-and-by, I mean."
	But his ill-informed hesitations soon gave way to esthetic

[ 54 ]

	empathy. Many decades later Van remembered having much
	admired the lovely, naked, shiny, gaudily spotted and streaked
	sharkmoth caterpillars, as poisonous as the mullein flowers
	clustering around them, and the flat larva of a local catocalid
55.05	whose gray knobs and lilac plaques mimicked the knots and
	lichens of the twig to which it clung so closely as to practically
	lock with it, and, of course, the little Vaporer fellow, its black
	coat enlivened all along the back with painted tufts, red, blue,
	yellow, of unequal length, like those of a fancy toothbrush
55.10	treated with certified colors. And that kind of simile, with
	those special trimmings, reminds me today of the entomological
	entries in Ada’s diary—which we must have somewhere, mustn’t
	we, darling, in that drawer there, no? you don’t think so? Yes!
	Hurrah! Samples (your round-cheeked script, my love, was
55.15	a little larger, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing has
	changed):
	"The retractile head and diabolical anal appendages of the
	garish monster that produces the modest Puss Moth belong to
	a most uncaterpillarish caterpillar, with front segments shaped
55.20	like bellows and a face resembling the lens of a folding camera.
	If you gently stroke its bloated smooth body, the sensation is
	quite silky and pleasant—until the irritated creature ungratefully
	squirts at you an acrid fluid from a slit in its throat."
	"Dr. Krolik received from Andalusia and kindly gave me
55.25	five young larvae of the newly described very local Carmen
	Tortoiseshell. They are delightful creatures, of a beautiful jade
	nuance with silvery spikes, and they breed only on a semi-extinct
	species of high-mountain willow (which dear Crawly also ob-
	tained for me)."
55.30	(At ten or earlier the child had read—as Van had—Les
	Malheurs de Swann, as the next sample reveals):

[ 55 ]

	"I think Marina would stop scolding me for my hobby
	(‘There’s something indecent about a little girl’s keeping such
	revolting pets...,’ ‘Normal young ladies should loathe snakes
	and worms,’ et cetera) if I could persuade her to overcome her
56.05	old-fashioned squeamishness and place simultaneously on palm
	and pulse (the hand alone would not be roomy enough!) the
	noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of
	Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus flesh colored,
	with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff
56.10	‘Sphinxian’ attitude."
	(Lovely stuff! said Van, but even I did not quite assimilate
	it, when I was young. So let us not bore the boor who flips
	through a book and thinks: "what a hoaxer, that old V.V.!")
	At the end of his so remote, so near, 1884 summer Van, before
56.15	leaving Ardis, was to make a visit of adieu to Ada’s larvarium.
	The porcelain-white, eye-spotted Cowl (or "Shark") larva,
	a highly prized gem, had safely achieved its next metamorphosis,
	but Ada’s unique Lorelei Underwing had died, paralyzed by
	some ichneumon that had not been deceived by those clever
56.20	prominences and fungoid smudges. The multicolored tooth-
	brush had comfortably pupated within a shaggy cocoon, promis-
	ing a Persian Vaporer later in the autumn. The two Puss Moth
	larvae had assumed a still uglier but at least more vermian and
	in a sense venerable aspect: their pitchforks now limply trailing
56.25	behind them, and a purplish flush dulling the cubistry of their
	extravagant colors, they kept "ramping" rapidly all over the
	floor of their cage in a surge of prepupational locomotion.
	Aqua had walked through a wood and into a gulch to do it last
	year. A freshly emerged Nymphalis carmen was fanning its
56.30	lemon and amber-brown wings on a sunlit patch of grating, only
	to be choked with one nip by the nimble fingers of enraptured
	and heartless Ada; the Odettian Sphinx had turned, bless him,

[ 56 ]

	into an elephantoid mummy with a comically encased trunk
	of the guermantoid type; and Dr. Krolik was swiftly running
	on short legs after a very special orange-tip above timberline, in
	another hemisphere, Antocharis ada Krolik (1884)—as it was
57.05	known until changed to A. prittwitzi Stümper (1883) by the
	inexorable law of taxonomic priority.
	"But, afterwards, when all these beasties have hatched," asked
	Van, "what do you do with them?"
	"Oh," she said, "I take them to Dr. Krolik’s assistant who sets
57.10	them and labels them and pins them in glassed trays in a clean
	oak cabinet, which will be mine when I marry. I shall then have
	a big collection, and continue to breed all kinds of leps—my
	dream is to have a special Institute of Fritillary larvae and
	violets—all the special violets they breed on. I would have eggs
57.15	or larvae rushed to me here by plane from all over North
	America, with their foodplants—Redwood Violets from the
	West Coast, and a Pale Violet from Montana, and the Prairie
	Violet, and Egglestone’s Violet from Kentucky, and a rare
	white violet from a secret marsh near an unnamed lake on an
57.20	arctic mountain where Krolik’s Lesser Fritillary flies. Of course,
	when the things emerge, they are quite easy to mate by hand—
	you hold them—for quite a while, sometimes—like this, in
	folded-wing profile" (showing the method, ignoring her poor
	fingernails), "male in your left hand; female in your right, or
57.25	vice versa, with the tips of their abdomens touching, but they
	must be quite fresh and soaked in their favorite violet’s reek."

[ 57 ]