is inamorata walked now
with the crown of the forbidden upon her haughty little head; and that
Crosby was more of a natural boy than his effeminate tastes indicated is
proven by the fact that he loved Sissy far more for this than for being
"the good one" his mother had once thought and proclaimed her.

At the sluice-box which circles Mount Davidson, bringing the purest of
water from a mountain lake, the party halted and was joined by other
brave mountaineers, big and little; the latter in calico skirts, and
shirts and knickerbockers. Bombey Forrest was the only one who came
under neither of these heads. She was a slender slip of a girl whose
mother, to the scandal of conventional folk, believed that for the first
decade or so of child-life the boy's costume is fitter than the girl's.
So Bombey wore a knickerbockered sailor-suit with a broad collar and
white braid; wore it with a bit of a conscious air, yet with that grace
which long use and habit lend; with piquancy, too, for she was the least
masculine of girls in mind and manner, and her delicate face with its
golden curls bloomed like a flower on a strange stalk, above the
assertive masculinity of her attire.

It was to Bombey that Crosby Pemberton turned for solace. (Split had
promptly deserted him for Kate, whom she suspected of a contemptible
desire to cut loose from the Madigans as children, and join the older
members of the party.) He had not had the courage to forgo the picnic,
though he knew his mistress well enough to be sure that by the end of
the day he would realize that that course would have been the least
painful. He carried Bombey's basket, like the little gentleman he was;
not in the division-of-labor fashion, from which Cody's and Sissy's
jangling buckets extracted a sort of cow-bell music as they ran merrily
along, far in advance.

Cody spied the two below when he and Sissy sat down to rest on a huge
boulder. Jack never knew how to treat Bombey Forrest, always feeling
that the most decent thing to do was not to look at her. Despite his own
bitter and recurring experiences (which, one might fancy, would have
made him tender to the vicissitudes of sex as warranted by clothing),
something in him felt outraged and resentful at the sight of her.

"Look at the girl-boy and the boy-girl!" he sneered. "See how they poke
along. They'll never get to the top."

Sissy's shoes were hot and dusty. The strong odor of sage-brush was in
her nostrils. Her skirt