naked before me.

* * * * *

It was a custom of mine to swing my feet as I ate; "just like a little
calf wags its tail when it sucks its mother's tit," my grandmother would
say. I swung my feet vigorously that morning, but did not eat noisily,
as my uncles, all my male relatives, in fact, did. I never made a noise
when I ate. I handled my food delicately by instinct. If I found a fly
in anything it generally made me sick to my stomach.

Feeling warm, I suppose, in her heart toward me, because I was different
in my ways, and frail-looking, and spoke a sort of book-English and not
the _lingua franca_ that obtained as speech in the Middle West, my Aunt
Rachel heaped my plate with griddle cakes, which she made specially for
me.

"You're goin' to be diff'rent from the rest, the way you read books and
newspapers," she remarked half-reverentially.

* * * * *

A foamy bend in a racing brook where an elbow of rock made a swirling
pool about four-foot deep. Phoebe took me there.

We undressed.

How smooth-bodied she was, how different from me! I studied her with
abashed, veiled glances. The way she wound her hair on the top of her
head, to put it out of the way, made her look like a woman in miniature.