fear was that it would be discovered she was being Undine.
This quality is natural in a child; what is not so usual is that
a woman should retain it all her life. She kept secrets like that
hidden away in her nature--recesses that were seldom pene-
trated.

The two great interests in her life, mathematics and poetry--
often closely allied--absorbed her by the time she was fifteen.
Years later she wrote: "The higher mathematics is the only
complete means by which the finite mind can hope to reach
the infinite and it is the only satisfactory escape from reality
I know." This gives one pause, for escape is here used in a
very different sense from the one generally employed. She did
not mean something afar from the field of our sorrow, some-
where to go when the world is too much with us. A drunkard
drowning his sorrows, the mountaineer looking at the bright
face of danger, or the hermit in his cell are all in varying de-
grees escapists fleeing what they fear or do not care to face,
impelled by a deep and in itself a sane instinct.

So much depends upon what you want to get away from.
The escapes most of us pursue are but narcotics or counter-
irritants. But in the choice of an escape it is obvious that Alice
was not running away from anything, but seeking peace, re-
freshment, and a source of strength.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual ex-
ercise is to have succeeded in life and perhaps
only in law and the higher mathematics may
this devotion be maintained.

This imaginative realm was constantly before her and ap-
pears over and over again in her work. "I believe, as Weierstrass
said, God gave us the integers . . . It is strange to think of two
such men as Napoleon and Lewis Carroll having a bond in
common, that of mathematics." Echoing Kant, she says of one
of her heroines: "But Lorna, at ten years old, had fallen in love
with the stars . . . Catenary and parabolic, the two words fas-
cinated her and seemed to open up a vista." And in her
splendid apostrophe:

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