That's what I look at some people for. I like to know about them. I think them over afterward.

Somehow, something always happens just before things get to the very worst. It is as if Magic did it. If I could only just remember that always. The worse thing never quite comes.

Magic is in her just as it is in Dickon," said Colin. "It makes her think of ways to do things - nice things.

She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.

Might I," quavered Mary, "might I have a bit of earth?

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much.