For one thing I had awakened to a comprehension of her beauty. Her face was rarely out of my mind, with its arrogant innocence, its sudden brilliancies and its as sudden languors. Her movements delighted me, her darting grace, the insolent assurance of her carriage, and then, without warning, the relapse into the child or the hoyden.* Even her bad manners soon ceased to annoy me, for in my eyes they had lost all vulgarity. They were the harshnesses of a creature staving off tragedy. Indeed it was her very extravagances that allured, for they made me see her as a solitary little figure set in a patch of light on a great stage among shadows, defying of her own choice the terrors of the unknown.
What made my capture complete was the way she treated me. She seemed to have chosen me as her friend, and to find comfort and security in being with me. To others she might be rude and petulant, but never to me. Whenever she saw me she would make straight for me, like a docile child waiting for orders. She would dance or sit out with me till her retinue of youth was goaded to fury.
She seemed to guess at the points in her behaviour which I did not like and to strive to amend them. We had become the closest friends, and friendship with Koré Arabin was a dangerous pastime.
From ‘The Dancing Floor’ (1926) by John Buchan (1875-1940).
* Jane Austen gave us a perfect cameo of the little hoyden in Catherine Morland at the age of ten, who “was fond of all boys’ play” and was “noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house”. See An Unlikely Heroine. The word ‘hoyden’, which probably comes from Middle Dutch and is related to the word ‘heathen’, is considered dated now. If anyone dared apply such a label today, he might call Koré a tomboy; but a tomboy may be anxiously cultivating an ironic style, whereas a hoyden just doesn’t care — a defining element of Koré’s magnetism.