Little girls wear white dresses with skirts that flare out to show their funny little knees, and they wear round-toed black patent-leather slippers held by a one-button strap, and their white socks are held up by a dab of soap, and their hair hangs down the back in braid with a blue ribbon on it. That was Anne Stanton and it was Sunday and she was going to church to sit still as a mouse and rub her tonguetip pensively at the place where she had just lost the tooth. And little girls sit on hassocks and lean their cheeks pensively against the dear father's knee while his hand toys with the silken locks and his voice reads beautiful words. That was Anne Stanton. And little girls are fraidy-cats and try the surf with one toe that first day in spring, and when the surf makes a surprising leap and splashes their thigh with the tingle and cold they squeal and jump up and down on thin little legs like stilts. That was Anne Stanton. Little girls get a smudge of soot on the end of the nose when they roast wieners over the campfire and you–for you are a big boy and do not get soot on your nose–point your finger and sing, "Dirty-Face, Dirty-Face, you are so dirty you are a disgrace!" And then one day when you sing it, the little girl doesn't say a thing back the way she always had, but turns her big eyes on you, out of the thin little smooth face, and her lips quiver an instant so that you think she might cry even tough she is too big for that now, and as the eyes keep fixed o you, the grin dries up on your face and you turn quickly away and pretend to be getting some more wood. That was Anne Stanton.

All the bright days by the water with the gull flashing high were Anne Stanton. But I didn't know it. And all the not bright days with the eaves dripping or the squall driving in from the sea and with the fire on the hearth were Anne Stanton, too. But I didn't know that, either. Then there came a time when the nights were Anne Stanton. But I knew that.

That began the summer when I was twenty-one and Anne Stanton was seventeen. I was back from the University for vacation and I was a grown man who had been around. I got back from the University late in the afternoon, had a quick swim, ate my dinner, and bolted off to the Stanton house to see Adam. I saw him sitting out on the gallery reading a book (Gibbon, I remember) in the long twilight. And I saw Anne. A was sitting in the swing with Adam, when she came out the door. I looked at her and knew that it had been a thousand years since I had last seen her back at Christmas when she has been back at the Landing on vacation from Miss Pound's School. She certainly was not now a little girls wearing round-toed, black-patent-leather, flat-heeled slippers held on by a one-button strap and white socks held up by a dab of soup. She was wearing a white linen dress, cut very straight, and the straightness of the cut and the stiffness of the linen did nothing in the world by suggest by a kind of teasing paradox the curves and softness sheathed by the cloth. She had her hair in a knot on the nape of the neck, and a little white ribbon around her head, and she was smiling at me with a smile which I had known all my life but which was entirely new, and saying, "Hello, Jack," while I held her strong narrow hand in mine and new that summer had come.

It had come. And it was not like any summer which ever had been or was to be again. During the day I would be with Adam a lot, like always, and a lot of the time she would tag along, for that was the way it had been before, she'd tag along for she and Adam were very close. That summer Adam and I would play tennis in the early morning before the sun got high and hot, and she would come to the court with us and sit in the dappled shade of the mimosas and myrtles and watch Adam beat the tar out of me as usual and laugh like bird song and mountain brooks when I got my feet tangle up in my own racket. The she might play me some, for she was pretty good and I was pretty bad. She was pretty god, all right, for a light-built girl, and had a lot of power in those small round arms, which flashed in the morning sun like wings. She was fast on her feet, too, and there would be the whipping skirt like a dance's, and the flicker of white shoes. But of those mornings I chiefly remember her far over yonder across the court, tiptoe, poised to serve, at the moment when the racket is back of her ribbon-bound head, with the pull of the arm lifting the right breast, and the left hand, from which the ball has just risen, still up, as though to pluck something out of the air, the face lifted gravely and intensely to the bright light and the wide sky and the absolutely white ball hung there like the spinning world in the middle of brilliance. Well, that is the classic pose, and it is too bad the Greeks didn't play tennis, for if they had played tennis they would have put Anne Stanton on a Greek vase. But on second thoughts, I guess they would not have done it. That is the moment which, for all its poise, is too airy, too tiptoe, too keyed up. It is the moment just before the stroke, before the explosion, and the Greeks didn't put that kind of moment on a vase. So that moment is not on a vase in a museum, but is inside my head, where nobody else can see it but me. For it was the moment before the explosion, and it did explode. The racked smacked and the sheep gut whanged and the white ball came steaming across at me, and I missed it as like as not, and the game was over, and the set was over, and we all went home, through the motionless heat, for the dew was off the grass now and the morning land breeze had died.

But back then there was always the afternoon. In the afternoon we always went swimming, or sailing and then swimming afterward, all three of us, and sometimes some of the other boys and girls whose folks live down the Row from the Landing or who were visiting there. Then after dinner we would get together again and sit in the shadow on their gallery or mine, or go to a movie, or take a moonlight swim. But one night when I went down, Adam wasn't there–he had had to drive his father somewhere–and so I asked Anne to go down to the Landing to a movie. On the way back, we stopped the car–I had the roadster, for my mother had gone off somewhere with a gang in her big one–and looked at the moonlight on the bay beyond Hardin Point. The moonlight lay on the slightly ruffling water like a swath of brilliant white, cold fire. You expected to see that white fire start eating out over the whole ocean the way fire is a sage field spreads. But it lay there glittering and flickering in a broad nervous swath reaching out yonder to the bright horizon blur.

We sat there in the car, arguing about the movie we had just seen and looking up the swath of light. Then the talking dies away. She had slid down a little in the seat, with her head lying on the top of the back cushion so that now she wasn't looking out toward the horizon but up into the sky–for the top of the roadster was down–with the moonlight pouring down on her face to make it look smooth as marble. I slid down a little, too, and looked up at the sky, and the moonlight poured down over my face, such as it was. I kept thinking that now in a minute I would reached over and take hold. I stole a look sidewise and saw how her face was smooth as marble in the moonlight. And how her hands lay supine on her lap, the fingers curling a little as though to receive a gift. It would be perfectly easy to reach over and take her hand and get started and se where we wound up. For I was thinking in language like that, the stale impersonal language of the College Boy who thinks he's such a God-damned big man.

But I didn't reach over. It seemed a thousand miles across that little patch of leather to where she lay with her head back and her hands in her lap and the moonlight over her face. I didn't know why I didn't reach over. I kept assuring myself that I wasn't timid, wasn't afraid, I said to myself, hell, she was just a kid, what the hell was I hanging back for, all she could do would be to get sore and I could stop if she got sore. Hell, I told myself, she wouldn't get sore anyway, she knew what was up, she knew you didn't sit in parked cars with boys to play checkers in the moonlight, and she had probably been worked over plenty, somebody had probably run the scales on her piano. I played with that thought a second, and then all at once I was both hot and angry. I started up in the seat, a sudden tumult of something in my chest. "Anne," I said, "Anne–" and didn't know what I was going to say.