But here I am analyzing them before they had learned they had any self to analyze.  But they existed, all the same.

Marjorie was a plain little body while Hollis was noticeably handsome with eloquent brown eyes and hair with its golden, boyish beauty just shading into brown; his sensitive, mobile lips were prettier than any girl’s, and there was no voice in school like his in tone or culture.  Mr. Holmes was an elocutionist and had taken great pains with Hollis Rheid’s voice.  There was a courteous gentleness in his manner all his own; if knighthood meant purity, goodness, truth and manliness, then Hollis Rheid was a knightly school-boy.  The youngest of five rough boys, with a stern, narrow-minded father and a mother who loved her boys with all her heart and yet for herself had no aims beyond kitchen and dairy, he had not learned his refinement at home; I think he had not learned it anywhere.  Marjorie’s mother insisted that Hollis Rheid must have had a praying grandmother away back somewhere.  The master had written to his friend, Miss Prudence Pomeroy, that Hollis Rheid was a born gentleman, and had added with more justice and penetration than he had shown in reading Marjorie, “he has too little application and is too mischievous to become a real student.  But I am not looking for geniuses in a country school.  Marjorie and Hollis are bright enough for every purpose in life excepting to become leaders.”

“Are you going to church, to-night?” Hollis inquired as she seated herself carefully on the sled.

“In the church?” she asked, bracing her feet and tucking the ends of her shawl around them.

“Yes; an evangelist is going to preach.”

“Evangelist!” repeated Marjorie in a voice with a thrill in it.

“Don’t you know what that is?” asked Hollis, harnessing himself into the sled.

“Oh, yes, indeed,” said she.  “I know about him and Christian.”

Hollis looked perplexed; this must be one of Marjorie’s queer ways of expressing something, and the strange preacher certainly had something to do with Christians.

“If it were not for the fractions I suppose I might go.  I wish I wasn’t stupid about Arithmetic.”

“It’s no matter if girls are stupid,” he said consolingly.  “Are you sure you are on tight?  I’m going to run pretty soon.  You won’t have to earn your living by making figures.”

“Shall you?” she inquired with some anxiety.

“Of course, I shall.  Haven’t I been three times through the Arithmetic and once through the Algebra that I may support myself and somebody else, sometime?”

This seemed very grand to child Marjorie who found fractions a very Slough of Despond.

“I’m going to the city as soon as Uncle Jack finds a place for me.  I expect a letter from him every night.”

“Perhaps it will come to-night,” said Marjorie, not very hopefully.

“I hope it will.  And so this may be your last ride on Flyaway.  Enjoy it all you can, Mousie.”