"I said I'd _read_ them," Nan replied. "I didn't say I'd thought of
them."

Gerda looked at her with her wide, candid gaze, with the unrancorous
placidity of the young, who are still used to being snubbed. Nan, she
knew, would tease and baffle, withhold and gibe, but would always say
what she thought in the end, and what she thought was always worth
knowing, even though she was middle-aged.

Nan, turning her lithe body over on the grass, caught the patient child's
look, and laughed. Generous impulses alternated in her with malicious
moods where these absurd, solemn, egotistic, pretty children of Neville's
were concerned.

"All right, Blue Eyes. I'll write it all down for you and send it to you
with the MS., if you really want it. You won't like it, you know, but I
suppose you're used to that by now."

Neville listened to them. Regret turned in her, cold and tired and
envious. They all wrote except her. To write: it wasn't much of a thing
to do, unless one did it really well, and it had never attracted her
personally, but it was, nevertheless, something--a little piece of
individual output thrown into the flowing river. She had never written,
even when she was Gerda's age. Twenty years ago writing poetry hadn't
been as it is to-day, a necessary part of youth's accomplishment like
tennis, French or dancing. Besides, Neville could never have enjoyed
writing poetry, because for her the gulf between good verse and bad was
too wide to be bridged by her own achievements. Nor novels, because she
disliked nearly all novels, finding them tedious, vulgar, conventional,
and out of all relation both to life as lived and to the world of