. These former companions had become superior beings,
they could not help showing it, and their presence destroyed 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 fr