her people.

But the blunt, merciless curiosity of other children soon taught
Athalie to be on her guard. She learned that embarrassed reserve which
tended toward secretiveness and untruth before she was eleven.

And in school she learned to lie, learned to deny accusations of being
different, pretended that what her sisters accused her of had been
merely "stories" made up to amuse them.

So, in school, she made school-life endurable for herself. Yet,
always, there seemed to be _something_ between her and other children
that made intimacies impossible.

At the same time she was conscious of the admiration of the boys, of
something about herself that they liked outside of her athletic
abilities.

She had a great many friends among the boys; she could out-run,
out-jump, out-swim any of them in the big country school. She was
supple and trim, golden-haired and dark-eyed, and ready for anything
that required enterprise and activity of mind or body. Her ragged
skirts were still short at eleven--short enough not to impede her. And
she led the chase for pleasure all over that part of Long Island,
running wild with the pack from hill to tide-water until every farmer
in the district knew "the Greensleeve girl."

There was, of course, some deviltry among cherry trees and apple
orchards--some lawlessness born of sheer exuberance and superb
health--some malicious trespassing, some harrying of unpopular
neighbours. But not very much, considering.

Her home life was colourless, calm, comfortable, and uneventful as she
regarded it. Business at the Hotel Greensleeve had fallen off and in
reality the children had very little. But children at that age who
live all day in the open, require little except sympathetic
intelligence for their million daily questions.

This the Greensleeve children found wanting except when their mother
did her best to stimulate her own latent intelligence for their sakes.

But it rested on the foundation of an old-fashioned and limited
education. Only the polite, simpler, and more maidenly arts had been
taught her in the little New Jersey school her father had kept. And
her education ceased when she married Greensleeve, the ex-"professor"
of penmanship, a kind, gentle, unimaginative man, unusually dull even
for a teacher. And he was a failure even at that.

They began married life by buying the house they were now living in;
and when Greensleeve also failed as a farmer, they opened the place as
a