Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland.

Don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?
Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown;
Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile, And trembled with fear at your frown!

Alice! A childish story take,
And with a gentile hand
Lay it where Childhood dreams are twined
In memory's mystic band,
Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers
Pluck'd in a far off land.

She had got up behind the chaise and her cloak had been caught by the wheel and was jammed in and it hung there. She was crying after it. Poor thing. Mr. Graham took her into the chaise and the cloak was released from the wheel but the child's misery did not cease for her cloak was torn to rags; it had been a miserable cloak before, but she had no other and it was the greatest sorrow that could befal her. Her name was Alice Fell.

Alice cold make no sense of the despair into which she had fallen. She had always held that happiness should be defined as an absence of pain rather than the presence of pleasure. So why, with a decent job, good health, and a roof over her head, did she regularly and so childishly collapse into moist sobs?

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

...And it was about four or five hours later that Alice — Remember Alice? It's a song about Alice.

In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.

I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree.
I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night.

She was a very small girl with a face as lovely and fresh as her son’s face — a very small girl. Most of the time she knew she was smarter and prettier than anyone else. But now and then a lonely fear would fall upon her so that she seemed surrounded by a tree-tall forest of enemies. Then every thought and word and look was aimed to hurt her, and she had no place to run and no place to hide. And she would cry in panic because there was no escape and no sanctuary.

Then one day she was reading a book — brown, with a silver title, and the cloth was broken and the boards thick. It was Alice in Wonderland. But it was the bottle which said, “Drink me” that had changed her life.

ALICE
She drank from a bottle called DRINK ME
And she grew so tall,
She ate from a plate called TASTE ME
And down she shrank so small.
And so she changed, while other folks
Never tried nothin' at all.

"It'll be no use their putting their heads down and saying "Come up again, dear!"
I shall only look up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then,
if I like being that person, I'll come up: if not, I'll stay down here
till I'm somebody else" — but, oh dear!' cried Alice, with a sudden burst
of tears, 'I do wish they WOULD put their heads down! I am so VERY tired
of being all alone here!"

When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far.

Daily Alice awoke, as she always did, when the sun broke in at her eastward windows with a noise like music. She kicked off the figured coverlet and lay naked in the long bars of sun for a time, touching herself awake, finding eyes, knees, breasts, red-gold hair all in place and where she had left them. Then she stood, stretched, brushed the last of sleep from her face, and knelt by the bed amid the squares of sun and said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers: