so. I have avoided
family life most carefully from this consideration, but much may be
obtained from women without going to extremes. In fact, if I may say so,
women impart their most favorable attributes solely under these
conditions. Good morning."

Winn left the small brown house with a heart that was strangely light.
Of course he didn't believe in doctors any more than Sir Peter did, but
he found himself believing that he was going to get well.

All the morning he had been moving his mind in slow waves that did not
seem like thoughts against the rock of death; but he came away from the
tiger-skins and the flickering laughter of Dr. Gurnet's eyes with a
comfortable sense of having left all such questions on the doorstep. He
thought instead of whether it was worth while to go down to the rink
before lunch or not.

It was while he was still undecided as to this question that he heard a
little shriek of laughter. It ran up a scale like three notes on a
flute; he knew in a moment that it was the same laughter he had
listened to the night before.

He turned aside and found himself at the bend of a long ice run leading
down to the lake. A group of men were standing there, and with one foot
on a toboggan, her head flung back, her eyes full of sparkling mischief,
was the child. He forgot that he had ever thought her a boy, though she
looked on the whole as if she would like to be thought one. Her curly
auburn hair was short and very thick, and perched upon it was a round
scarlet cap; her mouth was scarlet; her eyes were like Scotch braes,
brown and laughing; the curves of her long, delicate lips ran upward;
her curving thin, black eyebrows were like question-marks; her chin was
tilted upward like the petal of a flower. She was very slim, and wore a
very short brown skirt which revealed the slenderest of feet and ankles;
a sweater clung to her unformed, lithe little figure. She had an air of
pointed sharpness and firmness like a lifted sword. She might have been
sixteen, though she was, as a matter of fact, three years older; but she
was not so much an age as a sensation--the sensation of youth,
incredibly arrogant and unharmed. The men were trying to dissuade her
from the run. It had just been freshly iced; the long blue line of it
curved as hard as iron in and out under banks of ice far down into the
valley. A tall boy beside her, singularly like her in features and
coloring, but weaker in fiber and expression, said qu