The chief differences, then, between the printed and the destroyed versions represent the inevitable development of the author’s taste in minor particulars, and they are these: (1) There is appreciably less of the pursuit-and-escape device, and correspondingly more of the sheer revelling in natural beauty; (2) a great many exact measurements, in the form of dates, distances, rates, heights, and depths, have been omitted as realistic and therefore trivializing; (3) there is a somewhat maturer attempt to keep the fauna and flora consistent with latitude, altitude, and season; and (4) the lapse of time is managed rather more consciously and coherently than it was in the first place. If, in the treatment of these and other details of the story, there seems to be a progressive increase in maturity, that is a consequence and a measure of the nine months’ interval between the author’s revision of Part I and her revision of Parts II and III.
It will be observed that the differences involve little or no addition. The one piece of addition is in the episode of Eepersip’s young sister Fleuriss, which is considerably more developed. The obvious reason for this is that the author’s own young sister, at the time of the first draft, existed only as an insistent demand on Barbara’s part; whereas in the period of the revision she was a dream fulfilled, subject to adoring daily observation.
As to ordinary literacy, there is no perceptible difference, and has been none since the typewritten byproducts of Barbara’s sixth and seventh years. In short, what the reader is here given is an articulate eight- and nine-year-old child’s outpouring of her own dreams and longings in a fanciful tale, superficially revised by the hand of a twelve-year-old girl whose life on its more artificial side is made up principally of books and music.
It was the youthful author’s idea, not mine, that her story should be accompanied by a word of explanation from her father. I do not know how, when, or exactly why she formulated such a requirement, any more than I can explain where she got many another of the ideas with which she has been known to startle or confound me. Long after the story had been completed and while it was undergoing revision, there arrived a day on which I was told that the requirement existed: that Barbara had secretly been counting on me, and with pleasure in the thought. Pleasure! If I could give that, and so easily, and to her, it was not mine to make a gesture of resistance. I insist only that what I have to say shall be placed where it can stand between no reader and the story.
It would be neither good manners nor good sense for me to attempt any sort of appraisal of this chronicle of Eepersip’s adventures in the spacious rooms of her House without Windows. I have been too near to the whole thing, and am too near the chronicler. The most that I can now add without impropriety is a statement of why the first thought, a book to be manufactured but by no means published, gave way after all to a different idea.
It began to strike me that here was something representatively valuable—valuable, I mean, as a representation of something lovely in generalized childhood itself—and yet not so very likely to achieve frequent expression. The fact is that the impulses crystallized in this story mostly fade into the light of common day a year or two before the dawn of that amount of mechanical articulacy which is necessary for a tangible expression of them; and they are therefore almost never expressed. Actually, I do not happen to be acquainted with a single prose document of much scope which achieves the full expression, or any firsthand expression, of what in a normal, healthy child’s mind and heart during that mysterious phase when butterflies, flowers, winging swallow, and white-tapped waves are twice as real as even a quite bearable parent, and incomparably more important—the phase before there is any unshakable Tyranny of Things.
What is probably unusual about Barbara is the conspiracy of the circumstances which have made these two things, the phase and the necessary articulacy, overlap. She is precocious, and the phase may have lasted a year or two longer than it does in many. She is not excessively gregarious and has not been regimented in schools and groups; therefore nothing has as yet standardized her, or ironed out her spontaneity, or made her particularly ashamed
