ying out:--"Nancy's in love
with Hugh! Nancy's in love with Hugh!"

A sufficiently thrilling pastime, this, for Nancy could take care of
herself. I was a bungler beside her when it came to retaliation, and
not the least of her attractions for me was her capacity for anger: fury
would be a better term. She would fly at them--even as she flew at the
head-hunters when the Petrel was menaced; and she could run like a
deer. Woe to the unfortunate victim she overtook! Masculine strength,
exercised apologetically, availed but little, and I have seen Russell
Peters and Gene Hollister retire from such encounters humiliated and
weeping. She never caught Ralph; his methods of torture were more
intelligent and subtle than Gene's and Russell's, but she was his equal
when it came to a question of tongues.

"I know what's the matter with you, Ralph Hambleton," she would
say. "You're jealous." An accusation that invariably put him on the
defensive. "You think all the girls are in love with you, don't you?"

These scenes I found somewhat embarrassing. Not so Nancy. After
discomfiting her tormenters, or wounding and scattering them, she would
return to my side.... In spite of her frankly expressed preference
for me she had an elusiveness that made a continual appeal to my
imagination. She was never obvious or commonplace, and long before I
began to experience the discomforts and sufferings of youthful love
I was fascinated by a nature eloquent with contradictions and
inconsistencies. She was a tomboy, yet her own sex was enhanced rather
than overwhelmed by contact with the other: and no matter how many trees
she climbed she never seemed to lose her daintiness. It was innate.

She could, at times, be surprisingly demure. These impressions of her
daintiness and demureness are particularly vivid in a picture my memory
has retained of our walking together, unattended, to Susan Blackwood's
birthday party. She must have been about twelve years old. It was the
first time I had escorted her or any other girl to a party; Mrs. Willett
had smiled over the proceeding, but Nancy and I took it most seriously,
as symbolic of things to come. I can see Powell Street, where Nancy
lived, at four o'clock on a mild and cloudy December afternoon, the
decorous, retiring houses, Nancy on one side of the pavement by the iron
fences and I on the other by the tree boxes. I can't remember her dress,
only the exquisite sense of her slimness and daintiness comes b