coquetting with the shepherd lad on the other side of the clock. As a
boy, the shepherdess had been my ideal of feminine loveliness. Since
then my ideals had changed rapidly and often, but Beatrice reminded me
that the shepherdess had once been my ideal. She wore a broad straw
hat, with artificial roses which made it hang down on one side, and,
as she had been working in our garden, she wore huge gloves and
carried a trowel in one hand. As she entered, my grandfather rose
hastily from his chair and presented us with impressive courtesy.
"Royal," he said, "this is your cousin, Beatrice Endicott." If he had
not been present, I think we would have shaken hands without
restraint. But he made our meeting something of a ceremony. I brought
my heels together and bowed as I have been taught to do at the
Academy, and seeing this she made a low courtesy. She did this
apparently with great gravity, but as she kept her eyes on mine I saw
that she was mocking me. If I am afraid of anything it has certainly
never proved to be a girl, but I confess I was strangely embarrassed.
My cousin seemed somehow different from any of the other girls I had
met. She was not at all like those with whom I had danced at the hotel
hops, and to whom I gave my brass buttons in Flirtation Walk. She was
more fine, more illusive, and yet most fascinating, with a quaint old-
fashioned manner that at times made her seem quite a child, and the
next moment changed her into a worldly and charming young woman. She
made you feel she was much older than yourself in years and in
experience and in knowledge. That is the way my cousin appeared to me
the first time I saw her, when she stood in the middle of the room
courtesying mockingly at me and looking like a picture on an old
French fan. That is how she has since always seemed to me--one moment
a woman, and the next a child; one moment tender and kind and merry,
and the next disapproving, distant, and unapproachable.