Beastly Beauty

Forty

Maybe the court ladies are right.

Maybe Camille is a fool.

Baking cakes for a clockwork child. Trying when everyone else has given up. Defying despair.

But here’s the thing … It’s not so bad to be foolish. In fact, foolish people are vastly underrated.

Only a foolish person saves a broken-winged bird who will never fly again.

Only a foolish person hands a bunch of daisies to an angry old man.

Only a foolish person gives her nice new coat to a beggar girl.

The world doesn’t need more clever people. There are plenty of those to go around. You see them everywhere—sidestepping the broken and the lost, sneaking off behind a tree to eat their muffins so they don’t have to share them, busily dodging everyone else’s pain.

What the world needs is one thing only—more hopelessly foolish people doing shockingly foolish things.