“Speaking bluntly, precisely that! For a time at least.” “All right, Aunt Gracia! If you want to make it personal, I accept the challenge. We’ll see who gets Madelaine in the end—you or I. Only be a good sport if you lose, Aunt Grace. Be a good sport if you lose!” He vaulted the hedge and was gone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER X THE SEX I In the summer of 1904, the Methodist Sunday school held a picnic six miles up the river. It was a popular place for picnics,—a glen sloping down to a bathing beach, roofed with tall hemlocks and cut off from the road by a level meadow that made an excellent ball field. Nathan’s father had no grudge against picnics, at least Sunday-school picnics. But he did resent the dangerous mingling and flagrant propinquity of the sexes which such affairs occasioned. So Johnathan, not being able to attend the picnic himself and “keep an eye” on the boy, prohibited him the outing altogether. Girls—slathers of girls—would attend and lead Nat’s feet into paths of wickedness and byways that were vile. Johnathan had to go to Williams Falls and “see about a position” which had been “offered” him at more money than he was making in the cobbler shop. But Nathan’s mother, half in pique at John and half in distressed mother-love at the bitterness of her boy’s disappointment, told him to go ahead and enjoy the picnic and if his father said anything on his return, she would pay the piper. Bernie Gridley’s father cared nothing about picnics, even though he was a deacon in the church. The Duchess expected to attend merely to chaperone Bernice. But at the last moment the 8:10 train pulled into the Paris station with Gridley relatives. So the Duchess had to consign Bernice-Theresa to the watchful care of a much harassed and overworked Sunday-school teacher who later had a beau herself. Nathan and the little Gridley girl became babes in the wood. They needed no encouragement to make the most of their opportunity. It was one of those perfect August days of which young men write sonnets and older men compose symphonies. The sky gave no suggestion of the thunderstorm which was to come at three o’clock, interrupt the ball game, send the picnickers scurrying to cover and leave the world washed afterward in moist and golden glory. There is small space here for a detailed account of that day’s program, the sports or the luncheon or the minor mishaps or the shower or the return homeward afterward by moonlight. Only a brief record of a tryst which Nathan and I kept with two little girls off in leafy woods.