The young man grinned.  “Not at all.  I was afraid of a sprained ankle, so I hit on my head.  We meet on common ground, as it were.”

Once again he climbed the grade, once again he skidded downward, once again he went sprawling.  Nor were his subsequent attempts more successful.  After a final ignominious failure he sat where he had fetched up and ruefully took stock of the damage he had done himself.  Seriously he announced: 

“I was mistaken.  Women are entitled to vote—­they’re entitled to anything.  I’ve learned something else, too—­Mr. Newton’s interesting little theory is all wrong; falling bodies travel sixteen miles, not sixteen feet, the first second.”

The girl demanded her skees, and, without rising, Pierce surrendered them; then he looked on admiringly while she attached them to her feet and went zigzagging up the hill to a point much higher than the one from which he had dared to venture.  She made a very pretty picture, he acknowledged, for she was vivid with youth and color.  She was lithe and strong and confident, too; she was vibrant with the healthy vigor of the out-of-doors.

She descended with a terrific rush, and this time she took the air with grace and certainty.  She cleared a very respectable distance and ricocheted safely down the landing-slope.

Pierce applauded her with enthusiasm.  “Beautiful!  My sincere congratulations, O Bounding Fawn!”

“That’s the best I’ve done,” she crowed.  “You put me on my mettle.  Now you try it again.”

Pierce did try again; he tried manfully, but with a humiliating lack of success.  He was puffing and blowing, his face was wet with perspiration, he had lost all count of time, when his companion finally announced it was time for her to be going.

“You’re not very fit, are you?” said she.

Pierce colored uncomfortably.  “Not very,” he confessed.  He was relieved when she did not ask the reason for his lack of fitness.  Just why he experienced such relief he hardly knew, but suddenly he felt no great pride in himself nor in the life that had brought him to such a state of flabbiness.  Nor did he care to have this girl know who or what he was.  Plainly she was one of those “nice people” at whom Laure and the other denizens of the Rialto were wont to sneer with open contempt; probably that was why he had never chanced to meet her.  He felt cheated because they had not met, for she was the sort of girl he had known at home, the sort who believed in things and in whom he believed.  Despite all his recently acquired wisdom, in this short hour she had made him over into a boy again, and somehow or other the experience was agreeable.  Never had he seen a girl so cool, so candid, so refreshingly unconscious and unaffected as this one.  She was as limpid as a pool of glacier water; her placidity, he imagined, had never been stirred, and in that fact lay much of her fascination.

With her skees slung over her shoulder, the girl strode along beside Phillips, talking freely on various topics, but with no disposition to chatter.  Her mind was alert, inquisitive, and yet she had that thoughtful gravity of youth, wisdom coming to life.  That Pierce had made a good impression upon her she implied at parting by voicing a sincere hope that they would meet again very soon.