, for Nancy could take care of
herself. I was a bungler beside her when it came to retaliation, and not
the least of her attractions for me was her capacity for anger: fury
would be a better term. She would fly at them--even as she flew at the
head-hunters when the Petrel was menaced; and she could run like a deer.
Woe to the unfortunate victim she overtook! Masculine strength, exercised
apologetically, availed but little, and I have seen Russell Peters and
Gene Hollister retire from such encounters humiliated and weeping. She
never caught Ralph; his methods of torture were more intelligent and
subtle than Gene's and Russell's, but she was his equal when it came to a
question of tongues.

"I know what's the matter with you, Ralph Hambleton," she would say.
"You're jealous." An accusation that invariably put him on the defensive.
"You think all the girls are in love with you, don't you?"

These scenes I found somewhat embarrassing. Not so Nancy. After
discomfiting her tormenters, or wounding and scattering them, she would
return to my side.... In spite of her frankly expressed preference for me
she had an elusiveness that made a continual appeal to my imagination.
She was never obvious or commonplace, and long before I began to
experience the discomforts and sufferings of youthful love I was
fascinated by a nature eloquent with contradictions and inconsistencies.
She was a tomboy, yet her own sex was enhanced rather than overwhelmed by
contact with the other: and no matter how many trees she climbed she
never seemed to lose her daintiness. It was innate.

She could, at times, be surprisingly demure. These impressions of her
daintiness and demureness are particularly vivid in a picture my memory
has retained of our walking together, unattended, to Susan Blackwood's
birthday party. She must have been about twelve years old. It was the
first time I had escorted her or any other girl to a party; Mrs. Willett
had smiled over the proceeding, but Nancy and I took it most seriously,
as symbolic of things to come. I can see Powell Street, where Nancy
lived, at four o'clock on a mild and cloudy December afternoon, the
decorous, retiring houses, Nancy on one side of the pavement by the iron
fences and I on the other by the tree boxes. I can't remember her dress,
only the exquisite sense of her slimness and daintiness comes back to me,
of her dark hair in a long braid tied with a red ribbon, of her slender
legs clad in black stock