ly like
being athletic, anyway... she hoped they'd had the ordinary human
decency to give Gypsy just a little bit... Gypsy was a darling... that
wavy tail and those bright soft eyes and the white star.. . but you
don't have to be really athletic to ride a pony--you don't have to wear
breeches and do things like that... Arthur wasn't so much, anyway--he
had freckles and red hair and there was nothing romantic about him...
Sir Galahad would never have been so scared of Mr. Picker--he wouldn't
have shoved the blame off onto a maiden in distress... No, and she
didn't think the King of Spain would, either... Or Rev. MacGill... There
were lots of things just as good as being athletic... there were... lots
of things...

A moonbeam crept up the white sheet, to kiss the eyelids closed in
sleep.

CHAPTER VIII. A HAPPY DOWNFALL

Ah, pensive scholar, what is fame?--A fitful tongue of fickle flame. And
what is prominence to me, When a brown bird sings in the apple-tree? Ah,
mortal downfalls lose their sting When World and Heart hear the call of
Spring! You ask me why mere friendship so Outweighs all else that but
comes to go?... A truce, a truce to questioning: "We two are friends,"
tells everything. I think it vile to pigeon-hole The pros and cons of a
kindred soul. (From Melissa's Improvement on Certain Older Poets.)

The year Melissa was a high school Junior was fated to be an
unforgettable epoch. In the space of a few short months, all
mysteriously interwoven with their causes and effects, their trials
turning to glory, their disappointments and surcease inexplicable, came
revelations, swift and shifting, or what is really worth while in life.
Oh, Life! And oh, when one is sixteen years old! That is an age, as
many of us can remember, one begins really to know Life--a complex and
absorbing epoch.

The first of these new vistas to unspread itself before Missy's eyes was
nothing less dazzling than Travel. She had never been farther away from
home than Macon City, the local metropolis, or Pleasanton, where
Uncle Charlie and Aunt Isabel lived and which wasn't even as big as
Cherryvale; and neither place was a two-hours' train ride away. The
most picturesque scenery she knew was at Rocky Ford; it was far from the
place where the melons grow, but water, a ford and rocks were there, and
it had always shone in that prairie land and in Missy's eyes as a
haunt of nymphs, water-babies, the Great Spirit, and Nature's poetics