l git cold ... the idea of you children
laying in bed like this ... what on earth are you doing up there,
talking and talking? I kin hear you buzzing away clear down here!"

I had been rapt in telling Phoebe how, when I grew to be a man, I was
going to become a great adventurer, traveller, explorer.

Phoebe sat up on the edge of the bed, lazily stretching for a moment, as
a pretty bird stretches its leg along its wing. Then, her slim, nubile
body outlined sharply in the brilliant day, she stood up, slipped off
her flannel nightgown with a natural, unaffected movement, and stood
naked before me.

* * * * *

It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; "just like a little
calf wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit," my grandmother would
say. I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily,
as my uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise
when I ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly
in anything it generally made me sick to my stomach.

Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different
in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not
the _lingua franca_ that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt
Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for
me.

"You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and
newspapers," she remarked half-reverentially.

* * * * *

A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling
pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.

We undressed.

How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with
abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her
head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.

She dove first, like a water-rat. I followed on her heels.

We both shot to the surface immediately. For all the warmth of the day,
the water was deceptively icy. We crawled out. We lay on the bank, in
the good sun, gasping....

* * * * *

As we lay there, I spoke to her of her difference ... a thing which was
for the first time brought home to me in clear eyesight.

Phoebe proceeded to blaze her way into my imagination with quaint,
direct, explanatory talk ... things she had picked up God knows where
... grotesque details ... Rabelaisan concentrat