Books: White-Stone Days

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Mrs. Owen was not the only mother who was frightened by Parson Dodgson's passion for "the sweet relief of girl society." Nor can the mothers be blamed, for the Rev. Mr. Dodgson's way with "angels" was not orthodox. "Are they kiss-able?" he would write gaily to a mother. "I hope you won't be shocked at the question, but nearly all my girl friends ... are now on those terms with me (who am now 64). With girls . . . over fourteen ... I usually ask the mother's leave."

By the time Charles Dodgson died, in 1898, he had seen dozens of his kissable angels grow up into wives and mothers—not one of whom ever so much as hinted that life-with-Dodgson was anything but sheer heaven. He tamed angels to the very end, but in his last years the beautiful abstractions of algebraic logic became equally attractive to him. Three months before his death he marked with a white stone a day when he had not seen a little girl at all. His reason: "I have actually superseded the rules discovered yesterday" for "dividing a number by 9, by mere addition and subtraction."