Now she could stand as long as she wished, and stare and stare, and drink in everything which her childish imagination craved, and that was much.

The imagination of a child is often like a voracious maw, seizing upon all that comes within reach, and producing spiritual indigestions and assimilations almost endless in their effects upon the growth.

This window before which Ellen stood was that of a market: a great expanse of plate-glass framing a crude study in the clearest color tones.

It takes a child or an artist to see a picture without the intrusion of its second dimension of sordid use and the gross reflection of humanity.
Ellen looked at the great shelf laid upon with flesh and vegetables and fruits with the careless precision of a kaleidoscope, and did not for one instant connect anything thereon with the ends of physical appetite, though she had not had her supper.

What had a meal of beefsteak and potatoes and squash served on the little white-laid table at home to do with those great golden globes which made one end of the window like the remove from a mine, those satin-smooth spheres, those cuts as of red and white marble?
She had eaten apples, but these were as the apples of the gods, lying in a heap of opulence, with a precious light-spot like a ruby on every outward side.