Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not the lingua franca that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for me.

“You’re goin’ to be diff’rent from the rest, the way you read books and newspapers,” she remarked half-reverentially.

* * * * *

A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling pool about four-foot deep.  Phoebe took me there.

We undressed.

How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me!  I studied her with abashed, veiled glances.  The way she wound her hair on the top of her head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.

She dove first, like a water-rat.  I followed on her heels.

We both shot to the surface immediately.  For all the warmth of the day, the water was deceptively icy.  We crawled out.  We lay on the bank, in the good sun, gasping....

* * * * *

As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.

Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint, direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where ... grotesque details ...  Rabelaisan concentrations on seldom-expressed particulars....

I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps ... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...

The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but had not lifted the analogy up the scale....

A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling finger ... close together, we laughed into each other’s eyes, over-joyed that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....

Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine prerogative....

Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling reluctance rose in my breast....

* * * * *

She was astonished, stunned by my negation.

Silently I dressed,—­she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish mouth.

“You fool!  I hate you!  You’re no damn good!” she cried passionately.

With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back.  She began to sob.

Then we walked on a space.  And we sat down together on the crest of a hill.  My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing.  I was full of a power I had never known before.