every summer of her life in Lydford, it would be surprising if so energetic a child as Molly hadn’t assimilated the Vermont formula for fighting fire.  “They always put for the nearest factory and get all hands out,” he explained, adding meditatively, as he chewed on a twig:  “All the same, the incident shows what I’ve always maintained about Molly:  that she is, like ’most everybody, lamentably miscast.  Molly’s spirit oughtn’t to have taken up its abiding place in that highly ornamental blond shell, condemned after a fashionable girl’s education to pendulum swings between Paris and New York and Lydford.  It doesn’t fit for a cent.  It ought to have for habitation a big, gaunt, powerful man’s body, and for occupation the running of a big factory.”  He seemed to be philosophizing more to himself than to Sylvia, and beyond a surprised look into his extremely grimy face, she made no comment.  She had taken for granted from the talk between him and Molly that he was one of the “forceful, impossible Montgomery cousins,” and had cast her own first remarks in a tone calculated to fit in with the supposititious dialect of such a person.  But his voice, his intonations, and his whimsical idea about Molly fitted in with the conception of an “impossible” as little as with the actual visible facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls.  They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing on his birch-twig.  He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at it.  “Don’t you want one?” he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the road.  As he gave it to her he explained, “It’s the kind they make birch beer of.  You nip off the bark with your teeth.  You’ll like it.”

Still more at sea as to what sort of person he might be, and now fearing perhaps to wound him if he should turn out to be a very unsophisticated one, Sylvia obediently set her teeth to the lustrous, dark bark and tore off a bit, which gave out in her mouth a mild, pleasant aromatic tang, woodsy and penetrating, unlike any other taste she knew.  “Good, isn’t it?” said her companion simply.

She nodded, slowly awakening to a tepid curiosity about the individual who strode beside her, lanky and powerful in his blue jeans.  What an odd circumstance, her trudging off through the woods thus with a guide of whom she knew nothing except that he was Molly Sommerville’s cousin and worked a Vermont farm—­and had certainly the dirtiest face she had ever seen, with the exception of the coal-blackened stokers in the power-house of the University.  He spoke again, as though in answer to what might naturally be in her mind:  “At the top of the road it crosses a brook, and I think a wash would be possible.  I’ve a bit of soap in my pocket that’ll help—­though it takes quite a lot of scrubbing to get off fire-fighting grime.”  He looked pointedly down at her as he talked.

Sylvia was so astonished that she dropped back through years of carefully acquired self-consciousness into a moment of the stark simplicity of childhood.  “Why—­is my face dirty?” she cried out.