A few days after his rescue of Guy Ansley from the snow Tom Whitelaw found himself addressed by that young gentleman's sister, aged fourteen. She had plainly been watching for him as he went through Louisburg Square on his way from school. He had almost passed the Ansley steps before the tall, slight girl ran down them.
"Oh, Mr. Whitelaw!"
As it was the first time he had ever been honored with this prefix, he felt shocked and slightly foolish.
"Yes, Miss Ansley?"
A little breathless, she was, as he had noticed during their previous meeting, oddly grown up for her age, as one who takes responsibilities because there is no one else to bear them. She had the manner and selection of words of a woman of thirty.
"I hope you won't mind my waylaying you like this, but my brother would so much like to see you. You've been so awfully kind that I hope you'll come up. He's in bed, you know."
"When does he want me to come?"
"Well, now, if it isn't troubling you too much. You see, my father and mother are coming home to-night, and he'd like to have a word with you before then. He won't keep you more than a few minutes."
What Tom obscurely felt as an honor to himself she put as a favor he was doing them. It was an
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 honor in that it admitted him a little farther into privacies which to him seemed tapestried with privilege and tradition. His one brief glimpse of their way of living had not made him discontented; it had only appealed to his faculty for awe.
Awe was what he was aware of in following his young guide up the two red staircases to the room where the fat boy lay in bed. It was a mother's-darling's room, amusingly out of keeping with the pudgy, fleshy being whom it housed. Flowered paper on the walls, flowered hangings at the windows, flowered cretonnes on thickly upholstered armchairs, flowered silk on the duvet, garlands of flowers on the headboard and footboard of the virginal white bedstead, made the piggy eyes and piggy cheeks, bolstered up by pillows of which some were trimmed with lace, the more funnily grotesque. Tom Whitelaw saw neither the fun nor the grotesqueness. All he could take in was the fact that beauty could gild the lily of this luxury. He knew nothing of beauty in his own denuded life. The room with two beds which he still shared with Honey at Mrs. Danker's was not so much a sanctuary as a lair.
The fat boy's giggles were those of welcome, and also those of embarrassment.
"After the scrap the other night got sick. Bronchitis. Sit down."
Tom looked round to see what Miss Ansley was doing, but slipping away, she shut the door behind her. He sank into the flowered armchair nearest to the bed. The cracked girlish voice, which now had a wheeze in it, went on.
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"They've wired for dad and mother, and they're coming home to-night. Thought that before they got here I'd put you wise to something I want you to do."
Waiting for more, Tom sat silent, while the poor piggy face screwed itself up as if it meant to cry.
"Dad and mother think that because I'm so fat I'm not a sport. But they're dead wrong, see? I am a sport; only—only—" he was almost bursting into tears—"only the damn fat won't let me get it out, see?"
"Yes, I see. I now you're a sport all right, old chap. Of course!"
"Well, then, don't let them think the other thing, if they were to ask you."
"Ask me what?"
"Ask you what the row was about the other afternoon. If they do that tell 'em we were only playing nigger-in-the-henhouse, or any other snow game. Don't say I was knocked down by a lot of kids. Make 'em think I was having the devil's own good time."
Tom Whitelaw knew this kind of humiliation. If he had not been through Guy Ansley's special phase of it he had been through others.
"I'll tell them what I saw. You and a lot of other fellows were skylarking in the snow, and I went by and got you to knock off. As I had to pass your door we came home together; but when I found you were wet to the skin I advised Miss Ansley to see that you hit the hay. That's all there was to it."
In the version of the incident the strain of truth was sufficiently clear to allow the fat boy to approve
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 of it. He didn't want to tell a lie, or to get Tom Whitelaw to tell a lie; but sport having been the object with which he had stolen away on that winter's afternoon, it was easy to persuade himself that he had got it. Before Tom went away Guy Ansley understood that he would figure to his parents not as a victim but as something of a tough.
"Gee, I wish I was you," he grinned at Tom, who stood with his hands on the doorknob.
"Me!" Tom was never so astonished in his life. His eyes rolled round the room. "How do you think I live?"
"Oh, live! That's nothing. What I'd like to do is to rough it. If they'd let me do that I shouldn't be—I shouldn't be wrapped up in fat like a mummy in—in whatever it is they're wrapped up in. You can get away with anything on looks."
Sincere as was this tribute, it meant nothing to Tom Whitelaw, looks being no part of his preoccupations. What, for the minute, he was thinking about was that nobody in the world seemed to be quite satisfied. Here he was envying Guy Ansley his down quilt and his comfortable chairs, while Guy was envying him the rough-and-tumble of privation.
"I shouldn't look after him too much," he said to the young sister whom, on coming downstairs, he found waiting at the front door. "There's nothing wrong with him, except that he's a little stout. He's got lots of pluck."
Her face glowed. The glow brought out its intelligence. The intelligence set into action a demure, mysterious charm, almost oriental.
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"That's just what I always say, and no one ever believes me. Mother makes a baby of him."
"If he could only fight his own way a little more...."
"Oh, I do hope you'll say that if they speak to you about him."
"I will if I ever get the chance, but...."
"Oh, you must get the chance. I'll make it. You see, you're the only boy Guy's ever taken a fancy to who didn't treat him as a joke."
Tom assured her that her brother was not the only fellow who had a hard fight to put up during boyhood. He had seen them by the dozen who, just because of some trifling oddity, or unusual taste, were teased, worried, tormented, till school became a hell; but that didn't keep them from turning out in the end to be the best sports among them all. Very likely the guying did them good. He thought it might. He, Tom Whitelaw, had been through a lot of it, and now that he was sixteen he wasn't sorry for himself a bit. He used to be sorry for himself, but....
Seeing her for the second time, and in daylight, her features grew more distinct to him. He mused on them while continuing his way homeward. To say she was not pretty, as he had said the other night, was to use a form of words calling for amplification. It was the first time he had had occasion to observe that there are faces to which beauty is not important.
"It's the way she looks at you," was his form of summing up; and yet for the way she looked at you he had no sufficient phraseology.
That her eyes were long, narrow, and yellow-brown,
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 ever so slightly Mongolian, he could see easily enough. That her nose was short, with a little tilt to it, was also a fact he had no difficulty in stating. As for her coloring, it was like that of a russet apple when the brown has a little gold in it and the red the brightness of carmine. Her hair was saved from being ugly by running to the quaint. Straight, black—black with a bluish gloss—it was worn not in the pigtail with which he was most familiar, but in two big plaits curved behind the ears, and secured he didn't know how. She reminded him of a colored picture he had seen of a Cambodian girl, a resemblance enhanced by the dark blue dress she wore, straight and formless down the length of her immature, boylike figure, and marked at the waistline by a circle of gold braid.
But all these details were subordinate to something he had no power of defining. It was also something of which he was jealous as an injustice to Maisie Danker. If this girl had what poor Maisie had not it was because money gave her an advantage. It was the kind of advantage that wasn't fair. Because it wasn't fair, he felt it a challenge to his loyalty.
Nevertheless, he could not accept Maisie's offhand judgments when between five and six that afternoon he told her of the incident.
This was at The Cherry Tree, one of those bowers of refreshment and dancing recently opened on their own slope of Beacon Hill. Bower was the word. What had once been the basement-kitchen and coal cellar of a small brick dwelling had been artfully converted into a long oval orchard of cherry trees, in
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 paper luxuriance of foliage and blossom. Within the boskage, and under Chinese lanterns, there were tables; out in the open was a center oval cleared for dancing. Somewhere out of sight a cracked fiddle and a flat piano rasped out the tango or some shred of "rag." With the briefest intervals for breath, this performance was continuous. The guests, who at that hour in the afternoon numbered no more than ten or twelve, forsook their refreshments to take the floor, or forsook the floor to return to their refreshments, just as the impulse moved them. They were chiefly working girls, young men at leisure because out of jobs, or sailors on shore. Except for an occasional hoarse or screechy laugh, the decorum was proper to solemnity.
It was the fourth or fifth time Tom and Mai............