And now the queer fancy comes to him that she herself is so like a dragon-fly--so light, graceful, spiritual! Perhaps really she is a dragon-fly following him into the great city, where he struggles to live as a poet, just in order to console him.
She hides her wings, but that is only to prevent other people knowing.

Why not return once more to the home of childhood, back to the green fields and the sun?
"Little dragon-fly," he says to her, "let us go back! do you return to your beautiful summer shape, be a dragon-fly again, expand your wings of gauze; and I shall stop trying to write poetry.

I shall burn my verses; I shall go back to the streams where we played as children; I shall run about again with the joy of a child, and with you beautifully flitting hither and thither as a dragon-fly." Victor Hugo also has a little poem about a dragon-fly, symbolic only, but quite pretty.

It is entitled "La Demoiselle"; and the other poem was entitled, as you remember, "Ma Libellule." Both words mean a dragon-fly, but not the same kind of dragon-fly.

The French word "demoiselle," which might be adequately rendered into Japanese by the term _ojosan_, refers only to those exquisitely slender, graceful, slow-flitting dragon-flies known to the scientist by the name of Calopteryx.