Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/49

 conversation to himself, and he also kept to himself the fact that the mere touching of her velvet dress had caused him to like her better than any other girl he knew. It was a pity that she would have to go to Hell later on.

He longed to save her, and while he was in that spell the missionary which is in all of us was born, lived unpracticably, and died.

They met at dancing school, and at a class for wood carving and modeling in clay. Of all the children gathered together to be cultivated in the arts, Alice alone had talent. She sat next to Edward in the modeling class, and under her compulsion a lump of clay would actually get to looking like the head of a sheep or a dog without any intervention by the teacher. One day she made a thing that had a long tail and looked less like a man than a monkey. She said it was an ancestor, everybody's ancestor—Edward's and Edward's father's and mother's, and the ancestor of the people who invented Heaven and Hell. The teacher scolded Alice for making something that she had not been told to make, but he couldn't help laughing at what Alice had made. He kept it and had it baked and gave it to Alice's father.

Edward's infatuation grew. It is probable that little boys love as ardently as grown men. And in order to please her, he took risks of Hell and