ricity of indifference to their sex. In fact, if you tried to
talk about sex to young Ransome (and Mercier did try) he would denounce
it as "silly goat's talk," and your absorption in it as "the most
mutton-headed form of Flabbiness yet out."

* * * * *

But that was before the Grand Display of the autumn of last year, when
Winny Dymond appeared in the March Past of Section I of the Women's
Gymnasium; before he had followed Winny as she ran at top speed through
all the turnings and windings of the Combined Maze.

There were about fifty of them, picked; all attired in black stockings,
in dark-blue knickerbockers, and in tunics that reached to the knee,
red-belted and trimmed with red. Stunning, he called them; so much so
that they fair took away his breath.

That was what he said when it was all over. By that time he was ashamed
to confess that at the moment of its apparition the March Past had been
somewhat of a shock to him. He had his ideas, and he was not prepared
for the uniform; still less was he prepared for a personal encounter
with such quantities of young women all at once.

All sorts of girls--sturdy and slender girls; queer girls with lean,
wiry bodies; deceptive girls with bodies curiously plastic under the
appearance of fragility; here a young miracle of physical culture; there
a girl with the pointed breasts and flying shoulders, the limbs, the
hips, the questing face that recalled some fugitive soul of the woods
and mountains; long-nosed, sallow, nervous Jewish girls; English girls
with stolid, colorless faces; here and there a face rosy and full-blown,
or a pretty tilted profile and a wonderful, elaborate head of hair. One
or two of these heads positively lit up the procession with their red
and gold, gave it the splendor and beauty of a pageant.

They came on, single file and double file and four abreast, the long
line doubling and turning upon itself; all alike in the straight drop
of the arms to the hips, the rise and fall of their black-stockinged
legs, the arching and pointing of the feet; all deliciously alike in
their air of indestructible propriety. Here you caught one leashing an
iniquitous little smile in the corners of her eyes under her lashes; or
one, aware of her proud beauty, and bearing herself because of it, with
the extreme of indestructible propriety.

There were no words to express young Ransome's indifference to proud
beauty.

If he found somet