“I’m afraid a lot of them don’t. I never thought of such a thing until I left here.”
“I’m going to teach some of the girls on the pond on Saturday afternoon. If the boys were interested we could have some skating parties before we finish.”
Billy spent some strenuous nights on the ice, getting the boys interested. At the end of the first week a bonfire of pine roots at the edge of the pond made the illumination for a union skating meet, a laborious exercise for some of the class, but sending everyone home with a happy anticipation for the next time. Before it was over Billy set out with Ruth to follow the creek for a few miles down through the moonlit stretches of frosted barrens. The girl skated as she did everything else, freely and easily with an expression of joy of living in every stroke. He had never seen such rhythmic, easy, independent motion in girls’ athletics, and he wondered how she had acquired it.
“You must have taken to the out-doors soon after you learned to creep,” he ventured.
“I imagine I was kept pretty closely under cover at that time. I know when I was seven years old people still thought I wouldn’t grow up. My mother died when I was a few weeks old and a well-intentioned aunt put me into an exquisite nursery in the attic of her big house, and got an expensive nurse to take care of me, but I
just wouldn’t thrive. It was a very patient and far-seeing teacher who took me to the fields and taught me to climb trees and spent nearly a whole summer overcoming my fears of the lake. Then suddenly one day I swam away from her; after that I began to live. There must be hundreds of children like that whom no one ever bothers with. Had we better go back?”
“Tired?”
“No, but I think we’ve come far enough.”
She didn’t look tired. Of all the glowing, happy, well-poised creatures under the heavens she seemed the most thoroughly alive. Billy admired the quiet control that never sickened a pleasure with satiety, that reverenced a recreation enough to stop when it had recreated. He thought of the jaded girls he had seen dragging through after-midnight dances, in rooms reeking with air so poisoned that even the lamps burned blue and flickered, and he hoped she would teach them her creed of guarding her physical womanhood as a sacred trust. He hoped she could inspire a love for the clean out of doors that seemed to leave her tingling with the fires of pure oxygen.
Even the Representative, in spite of his prejudices, fell a convert to her social propaganda, and attended with less boredom than he had anticipated the tobogganings and sleigh-rides and taffy-pulling functions. Instead of finding his young people “one hundred per cent more of the