girls, to outwit or champion them as the eternal ends of justice might decree. Gritty could umpire a boy's lacrosse match, or substitute if any member of either team were disabled. She scorned handicaps. She hadn't much patience with dolls, and tore off the wig of Myrtle Wilcove's doll from Halifax in order that its attack of scarlet fever should seem more realistic. But, overwhelmed by Myrtle's even more realistic grief, Gritty had promptly readjusted the wig with glue "swiped" from her father's workshop. When it came to sailing boats, Gritty would never learn how to trim the sails and point the rudder to the requirements of the breeze; but, if your boat got stuck in the reeds of the marsh pond, nobody was more resourceful than she in getting it back for you, and she would wade in up to her middle at a pinch. She was the only girl who had ever "shinned up" to the top of the school flagpole. Once she had eaten a grasshopper on a dare, and next day had blackened Bob Meddar's eye for calling her "Bugs."
As a matter of fact, boys also, except in the case of a very few individuals, bored Paul. Among them he was never quite free from the dread that he was out of the picture, that the slightest expression of his really-truly opinion, as distinct from a sort of feigned community opinion, would at once let him in for a repetition of the hostile manifestation that had ended so disastrously on his second day of school, Indeed, the umbrella exploit had been re-enacted many times in terms of mordant words.
Before his ninth birthday he had discovered himself out of step with boys who did not live in a bare, mysterious house with an eccentric aunt. Privately he endured tortures of doubt at his own unclassifiability, and the pain was made more poignant by a conviction that he, and certainly Aunt Verona, were for some inexplicable reason more entitled to deference than the Dreers and
