"I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.
So I ran away to Kensington Gardens and lived a long long time among the fairies."
She gave him a look of the most intense admiration, and he thought it was because he had run away, but it was really because he knew fairies.
Wendy had lived such a home life that to know fairies struck her as quite delightful.
She poured out questions about them, to his surprise, for they were rather a nuisance to him, getting in his way and so on, and indeed he sometimes had to give them a hiding [spanking].
Still, he liked them on the whole, and he told her about the beginning of fairies.
"You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies."
Tedious talk this, but being a stay-at-home she liked it.
"And so," he went on good-naturedly, "there ought to be one fairy for every boy and girl."
"Ought to be? Isn't there?"