ions on seldom-expressed
particulars....

I learned many things at once from Phoebe ... twisted and childish, but
at least more fundamental than the silly stories about storks and
rabbits that brought babies down chimneys, or hid them in hollow stumps
... about benevolent doctors, who, when desired by the mothers and
fathers, brought additions to the family, from nowhere!...

The house-cat ... kittens and the way they came ... surely I knew, but
had not lifted the analogy up the scale....

A furtive hand touched mine, interwove itself, finger with thrilling
finger ... close together, we laughed into each other's eyes, over-joyed
that we knew more than our elders thought we knew....

Girls, just at the gate of adolescence, possess a directness of purpose
which, afterwards, is looked upon as a distinct, masculine
prerogative....

Phoebe drew closer to me, pressing against me ... but a fierce, battling
reluctance rose in my breast....

* * * * *

She was astonished, stunned by my negation.

Silently I dressed,--she, with a sullen pout on her fresh, childish
mouth.

"You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!" she cried passionately.

With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began
to sob.

Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a
hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung
about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a
power I had never known before.

* * * * *

I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting, and
how she might have made a good living renting it out, if she had used a
little business sense ... but now she let the whole of it to a caravan
of gypsies for their winter quarters,--who, instead of paying rent,
actually held her and Millie in _their_ debt by reading their palms,
sometimes twice a day ... I think it was my Uncle Joe who at last ousted
them....

* * * * *

When I came back from Aunt Rachel's I found a voluble, fat, dirty, old,
yellow-haired tramp established in the ground floor of the same house.
He had, in the first place, come to our back door to beg a hand-out.
And, sitting on the doorstep and eating, and drinking coffee, he had
persuaded my grandmother that if she would give him a place to locate on
credit he knew a way to clear a whole lot of money. His project for