We need just the information which concerns the rest of the family and the social influences of the children's lives.

I recognised at once every phrase which the children used in this play, where they got it, what it meant in its original context, and how far its meaning had been modified in this process, called in a figure "social heredity." But as that story is reported to strangers who have no knowledge of the children's social antecedents, how much beyond the mere facts of imitation and personification do they get from it?
And how much the more is this true when we examine those complex games of the nursery which show the brilliant fancy for situation and drama of the wide-awake four-year-old?
Yet we psychologists are free to interpret; and how rich the lessons even from such a simple scene as this! As for Helen, what could be a more direct lesson--a lived-out exercise--in sympathy, in altruistic self-denial, in the healthy elevation of her sense of self to the dignity of kindly offices, in the sense of responsibility and agency, in the stimulus to original effort and the designing of means to ends--and all of it with the best sense of the objectivity which is quite lost in wretched self-consciousness in us adults, when we personate other characters?
What could further all this highest mental growth better than the game by which the lessons of her mother's daily life are read into the child's little self?
Then, in the case of Elizabeth also, certain things appear.

She obeys without command or sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal suggestion in their simpler childish forms.

Certainly such scenes, repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterward confirms and proceeds upon; and lessons of the opposite character are learned by the same process.
All this exercise of fancy must strengthen the imaginative faculty also.

The prolonged situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the attention.