The quarrel was patched up somehow and they ate their lunch, at least they ate Bernie’s lunch. For when the Dresden Doll removed the cover from her dainty repast, an awful qualm smote Nathan at the coarseness of his own. With the subtlety of a boy, Nathan managed to push his package off the bank into the brook. When Bernie squealed a warning, the boy fell clumsily in his efforts to recover. So it floated away downstream, out of sight and certainly out of the possibility of humiliating mastication. Thereat Nathan affected to be both regretful and indifferent. He declared he could subsist till supper without luncheon. The Israelites fasted for forty days, didn’t they, and remained alive? But Bernie prevailed upon him that she had enough in her basket for half a dozen boys. So they ate their meal together, eyes averted. It was early afternoon when the girl suddenly cried: “Do you know what I’d like to do? For once in my life without Mother to say ‘Shocking! Shocking!’ I’d like to paddle in this brook as if I was common, and like vulgar children.” “You might fall in and get your clothes wet and have to go home all drenched and slithery.” “But you could take off your shoes and stockings and let me hold your hand!” Nathan demurred. He could not have explained just why. But the girl was not to be denied. She laughed at his discomfiture, sat down near the water’s edge, removed her pretty buckled slippers, peeled off her lisle stockings, rolled up her underclothing. Then she waded—timidly at first—out into the brook, squealing with delight. And she pulled her skirts higher and higher. Finally she had them above her dimpled knees. From his place on the bank, Nathan watched her and yet tried not to watch her. Much of the real Bernice, down underneath her mother’s affectation and snobbery, was revealed that day in the extravagance of her kisses and the bold display of her limbs. Four short years later Bernice Gridley was a mother. So it was more than a child’s sexless figure displayed to young Nathan that day. The boy’s nerves began cutting strange capers. Across forehead and chest was a queer, constricted feeling. The girl kicked and shrieked and played in the water. She called upon Nathan to follow. But the perturbed boy, discovering for the first time that his physical being was a thing apart from himself, tried to behave indifferently, interest himself in something else. For him the girl—all girls—changed again with that experience. Bernice was no longer a fellow human, a playmate, even some one to be kissed deliciously. Bernice laughed when she beheld the perturbation she was causing. Secretly she exulted. It was the first time she had been privileged to thus test her physical charm maliciously.