It's not a pretty world, Papa.''I've noticed,' my father said softly.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

A couple of them were school beauty-queen pretty while a few were that more real-looking type. A realer kind of pretty.