Mrs Calloway’s Reviews > Peter Pan > Status Update

If you or I or Wendy had been there, we should have seen that [Peter] was very like Mrs. Darling‘s kiss. He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees; but the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth. When he saw she was grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.

[Mrs Darling] dreamt that the Neverland had come to near and that a strange boy had broken through from it. He did not alarm her, but she thought she had seen him before in the faces of many women who have no children, perhaps he is to be found in the faces of some mothers also.

[Wendy] explain in quite a matter of fact way that she thought Peter sometimes came to the nursery in the night and sat on the foot of her bed and played on his pipes to her. Unfortunately, she never woke, so she didn’t know how she knew, she just knew.

[Wendy] meant that [Peter] was her size in both mind and body; she didn’t know how she knew it, she just knew it.

[Mrs Darling] had believed in [Peter] at the time, but now that she was married and full of sense, she quite doubted whether there was such a person.

Of all delectable islands, the Neverland is the snug the most compact, not large and sprawly, you know, tedious distances between one adventure and another, but nicely crammed. When you play at it by day with the chairs and the tablecloth, it is not in the least alarming, but in the twos before you go to sleep, it becomes very nearly real. That is why there are a nightlights.

On these magic shores children at play are forever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind, and on the top, beautifully aired, I spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.

Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds. It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repacking into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day.

No nursery could possibly have been conducted more correctly, and Mr Darling knew it, yet sometimes he wanted uneasy whether neighbours talked.