One day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room, the Rabbit asked, “What is to be real?”
“Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out wind-up handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Oh, sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “But when you are real, you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up?” he asked, “Or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved right off and your eyes dropped out and you get loose in the joints and become very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because when you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
“I suppose you are real?” asked the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But Skin Horse only smiled.
“The boy’s uncle made me real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago but once you’re real, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts always.”
The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called real happened to him. He longed to become real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become real without all those uncomfortable things happening to him.
