school, she had mastered the
lessons given her with careless ease. The effect was to give her an
unwholesome amount of leisure. She occupied this leisure in bedeviling
her teachers and inciting to riot the hardier spirits in the
school--among whom number Wint.She was, in those days, a wiry little thing, as hard as nails, as active
as a boy, and fully as daring. She had whipped one or two boys in fair,
stand-up fight, for Hetty had a temper that went with her hair. Her
hair, as has been said, was a pleasant and interesting red.As a child, she had been freckled. When she approached womanhood, these
freckles disappeared and left her with a skin creamy and delicious. Her
eyes were large, and warm, and merry. They were probably brown; it was
hard to be sure. All in all, she was--give her a chance--a beauty.Some men of science assert that all healthy children start life with an
equal heritage. They attribute to environment the developing differences
between men and between women. Hetty might have served them as an
illuminating example. In school, she had mastered her lessons quickly,
had led her classes as of right; while her schoolmates--including Wint,
who was not good at books--lagged woefully behind.This ascendancy persisted through the first half dozen years of
schooling; and then it began, gradually, to disappear. In high school,
it was not so marked; and at graduation, she and Wint--for example--were
fairly on a par.Then Wint went to college while Hetty went to work. She worked first in
a store and lost that place for swearing at her employer. Then she took
up housework, and so gravitated to the Chase household. There Wint
encountered her; and within a day or so he discovered that the years
since high school had borne him far ahead of Hetty. She now was
beginning to recede; her wave had reached its height and was subsiding.
He still bore on.These things may be observed more intimately in a small town; for there,
social differences do not so strictly herd the sheep apart from the
goats. Thus, while Hetty was his mother’s handmaid, neither Wint nor any
one else outspokenly considered her his inferior. She called him Wint,
he called her Hetty, and his mother likewise.Wint found her presence vaguely disturbing. That first night at supper,
she had winked at him behind his father’s back. The wink somewhat
chilled him. It savored of hardness--And there were other incidents.
Wint perceived that Hetty was no longer a schoolgirl; she was, vaguely,
sophisticated. Her old recklessness and daring remained; but they were
inspired now not by ebullient spirits but by indifference, by bravado."He remembered ugly rumors. Wint and Hetty had been, to some extent, comrades in their school days. Once or twice he had defended her against aggression; once he 

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