recall every detail of a seemingly casual conversation which she had held with the stalwart butcher boy who came daily to the kitchen door to deliver meat.  The first day she merely had broached the subject of Sunday picnics; the second she had intrigued him into giving her one or two fleeting details; the third day she held him captive a full ten minutes while he enlarged upon his subject.  And so on, until one morning he said, quite directly: 

“Would you like to go to one?...  If you do, I’ll take you.”

She had drawn back at first from this frontal attack, but in the end she decided to chance the experience.  She pretended to her mother that she was going to see a girl friend who was sick.  She met her crude cavalier at the ferry.  She even boarded the boat with him.  At first he had been a bit constrained and shy, but soon she felt the warm, moist pressure of his thick-fingered hands against hers.  And presently his arm encircled her waist.  With curious intuition she realized the futility of struggling against him...  She had to admit, in the end, that she found his physical nearness pleasurable...  She often had wondered, looking back on that day, what might have happened if she had gone through with this truant indiscretion.  But halfway on the journey her escort had deserted her momentarily to buy a cigar.  Left alone upon the upper deck of a ferryboat, crowded with a strident and raucous company, she had felt herself suddenly grow cold, not with fear, but with a certain haughty and disdainful anger.  These people were not her kind!  She had risen swiftly from her seat and hidden discreetly in the ladies’ washroom until after the boat had landed and was on its way back to the city.  When she got home she found the house in confusion.  Her father had been taken suddenly ill.

“I came very near sending to Nellie’s for you,” her mother had said.

The incident had taught her a lesson, but there were times when she regretted its termination—­when she was stirred to a certain morbid and profitless speculation as to what might have been.

Shortly after this a reaction began to set in against the dullness which certain people found desirable in the observation of what they were pleased to call with questionable humility the Lord’s Day, and by the time Helen had budded to womanhood this new tide was at its flood.  People, even piously inclined, were taking houses across the bay, at Belvedere or Sausalito or Mill Valley, for the summer.  Somehow, one didn’t go to church during this holiday.  Friends came over for Saturday and Sunday to visit, and the term “week-end” became intelligible and acquired significance.  The Somerses took a cottage for three successive seasons in Belvedere—­that is, they spoke of it as a cottage.  In reality, it was the abandoned hulk of a ferryboat that had been converted into rather uncomfortable quarters and set up on the slimy beach.  The effect of this unconventional habitation slowly undermined the pale