the Balance of
Things. For alas, I had not wholly abjured the feminine sex after all!
And from being a somewhat important factor in the lives of Ruth Hollister
and other young women I suddenly became of no account. New interests, new
rivalries and loyalties had arisen in which I had no share; I must
perforce busy myself with invoices of flour and coffee and canned fruits
while sleigh rides and coasting and skating expeditions to Blackstone
Lake followed one another day after day,--for the irony of circumstances
had decreed a winter uncommonly cold. There were evening parties, too,
where I felt like an alien, though my friends were guilty of no conscious
neglect; and had I been able to accept the situation simply, I should not
have suffered.

The principal event of those holidays was a play given in the old
Hambleton house (which later became the Boyne Club), under the direction
of the lively and talented Mrs. Watling. I was invited, indeed, to
participate; but even if I had had the desire I could not have done so,
since the rehearsals were carried on in the daytime. Nancy was the
leading lady. I have neglected to mention that she too had been away
almost continuously since our misunderstanding, for the summer in the
mountains,--a sojourn recommended for her mother's health; and in the
autumn she had somewhat abruptly decided to go East to boarding-school at
Farmington. During the brief months of her absence she had marvellously
acquired maturity and aplomb, a worldliness of manner and a certain
frivolity that seemed to put those who surrounded her on a lower plane.
She was only seventeen, yet she seemed the woman of thirty whose role she
played. First there were murmurs, then sustained applause. I scarcely
recognized her: she had taken wings and soared far above me, suggesting a
sphere of power and luxury hitherto unimagined and beyond the scope of
the world to which I belonged.

Her triumph was genuine. When the play was over she was immediately
surrounded by enthusiastic admirers eager to congratulate her, to dance
with her. I too would have gone forward, but a sense of inadequacy, of
unimportance, of an inability to cope with her, held me back, and from a
corner I watched her sweeping around the room, holding up her train, and
leaning on the arm of Bob Lansing, a classmate whom Ralph had brought
home from Harvard. Then it was Ralph's turn: that affair seemed still to
be going on. My feelings were a strange medley of