his bare toes that summer, life became like perfectly played music. This
was after the long vacation began, when there was no longer any need to
remember to let his voice fall after a period, or to dread his lessons so
that he must learn them more quickly than any other pupil in school. There
would be no more of that wretched fooling until fall, a point of time
inconceivably far away. Before it arrived any one of a number of strange
things might happen to avert the calamity of education. For instance, he
might be born again, a thing of which he had lately heard talk; a
contingency by no means flawless in prospect, since it probably meant
having the mumps again, and things like that. But if it came on the very
last day of vacation, or on the first morning of school, just as he was
called on to recite, snatching him from the very jaws of the Moloch, and
if it fixed him so he need not be afraid in the night of going where Milo
Barrus was going, then it might not be so bad.

Nancy, who had now discarded the good name of Lillian May for simple
Alice, disapproved heartily of being born again; unless, indeed, one could
be born a boy the second time. She was only too eager for the day when
she need not submit to having her hair brushed and combed so long every
morning of her life. Not for the world would she go through it again and
have to begin French all over, even at "_J'ai, tu as, il a_." Yet, if it
were certain she could be a boy--

He was too considerate to tell her that this was as good as
impossible--that she quite lacked the qualities necessary for that.
Instead, he reassured her with the chivalrous fiction that he, at least,
would like her as well as if she _were_ a boy. And, indeed, as a girl, she
was not wholly unsatisfactory. True, she played "school" (of all things!)
in preference to "wild animals," practised scales on the piano an hour
every day, wore a sun-hat frequently--spite of which she was