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 in the middle of a hot summer night, trotting in her pyjamas. Perhaps she felt a sudden solitude, and planned an emigration into Mother's bed. (Do you know that sound of small bare feet on large bare floors, heard from below?) Or after breakfast when she climbs on a chair by the victrola, puts on a record, and dances to it with solemn grace. Quick, flitting in every movement, a dancing shape, an image gay. "She's always running," said observant Christopher. "She's an awfully quaint little thing."

She knows a secret. There are suggestions of it sometimes in the stories she tells. Riding in the car she feels an urge to narrate. She invents a myth or a long chantey of her own and recites it endlessly—if she can compel the others to silence; not always easy, for they too have epics they hanker to impart. She makes unexpected flashes of utterance, as when Dean Swift, loudly blowing her horn, went carefully round a dangerous corner. "I hear the Dean saying Excuse Me," said Blythe. That clear spring day at Lloyds Neck, when a cold April wind was crisping frills of white broken water along the beach. The whole shore was edged with a pure white band of foam. It was one of those crystal days of