I have mentioned garden parties.  One of our annual institutions was Mrs. Willett’s children’s party in May; for the Willett house had a garden that covered almost a quarter of a block.  Mrs. Willett loved children, the greatest regret of her life being that providence had denied her a large family.  As far back as my memory goes she had been something of an invalid; she had a sweet, sad face, and delicate hands so thin as to seem almost transparent; and she always sat in a chair under the great tree on the lawn, smiling at us as we soared to dizzy heights in the swing, or played croquet, or scurried through the paths, and in and out of the latticed summer-house with shrieks of laughter and terror.  It all ended with a feast at a long table made of sawhorses and boards covered with a white cloth, and when the cake was cut there was wild excitement as to who would get the ring and who the thimble.

We were more decorous, or rather more awkward now, and the party began with a formal period when the boys gathered in a group and pretended indifference to the girls.  The girls were cleverer at it, and actually achieved the impression that they were indifferent.  We kept an eye on them, uneasily, while we talked.  To be in Nancy’s presence and not alone with Nancy was agonizing, and I wondered at a sang-froid beyond my power to achieve, accused her of coldness, my sufferings being the greater because she seemed more beautiful, daintier, more irreproachable than I had ever seen her.  Even at that early age she gave evidence of the social gift, and it was due to her efforts that we forgot our best clothes and our newly born self-consciousness.  When I begged her to slip away with me among the currant bushes she whispered:—­“I can’t, Hugh.  I’m the hostess, you know.”

I had gone there in a flutter of anticipation, but nothing went right that day.  There was dancing in the big rooms that looked out on the garden; the only girl with whom I cared to dance was Nancy, and she was busy finding partners for the backward members of both sexes; though she was my partner, to be sure, when it all wound up with a Virginia reel on the lawn.  Then, at supper, to cap the climax of untoward incidents, an animated discussion was begun as to the relative merits of the various colleges, the girls, too, taking sides.  Mac Willett, Nancy’s cousin, was going to Yale, Gene Hollister to Princeton, the Ewan boys to our State University, while Perry Blackwood and Ralph Hambleton and Ham Durrett were destined for Harvard; Tom Peters, also, though he was not to graduate from the Academy for another year.  I might have known that Ralph would have suspected my misery.  He sat triumphantly next to Nancy herself, while I had been told off to entertain the faithful Sophy.  Noticing my silence, he demanded wickedly:—­“Where are you going, Hugh?”

“Harvard, I think,” I answered with as bold a front as I could muster.  “I haven’t talked it over with my father yet.”  It was intolerable to admit that I of them all was to be left behind.