Free Sirius by Olaf Stapledon

two were always together, and never at a loss for talk. When Plaxy went to a party at the village school, where there was to be dancing, Sirius was of course lonely and bored, but he did not really mind. She would come back. When Sirius went off for the day with Thomas, it did not matter. Plaxy was lonely, but busy. And when he came back he would tell her all about it. Even when he went crazy over a new bitch she did not fundamentally mind. She was secretly and unexpectedly jealous; but she laughed at herself, and she kept her jealousy hidden. His love affairs, she told herself, were no concern of hers, and they did not really matter. Anyhow they were soon over; and she herself was beginning to be interested in a boy she had met at the dance, a young student, on holiday from Bangor.
    At this time Plaxy was already (so I was told) developing that rather queer gracefulness which became so striking in her maturity. Whether by native composition or by constant companionship with a non-human creature, or both, she earned the remark of the local doctor's wife, "That child is going to be a charmer, but somehow she's not quite human." At school she was often called "Pussy," and there was indeed a cat-like quality about her. Her soft hair and very large greenish blue eyes, her rather broad face, with its little pointed chin and flat nose, were obviously feline; so was her deliberate, loose-limbed walk. Sometimes when she was moody, and inaccessible to her own kind, her mother would call her "The cat that walked by itself." Not till long after I had married her did I tell her my own theory of her peculiar grace. It was, of course, the influence of Sirius, I said, that had created her "scarcely human" manner; but it was her latent antagonism to Sirius that had turned that manner cat-like. It was this character that enthralled him and exasperated him, and indeed all her admirers, from Conwy Pritchard to myself. There was one characteristic about her which particularly suggested an unconscious protest against Sirius, one which tended to be exaggerated whenever she was in conflict with him. This was the extraordinary delicacy and precision of the movements of her hands, both in practical operations and in gesture. It was as though her consciousness of herself was chiefly centred in her hands, and to a lesser degree in her eyes. This character of elegant "handedness" was something far stronger than mere felinity. It was reminiscent of those Javanese dancers who use their hands with such exquisite effect. It was at once human and "parahuman," so that she seemed to me not so much cat as fay. She was indeed at once cat, fawn, dryad, elf, witch.
    This description really applies to Plaxy in her early maturity, when I first met her; no doubt in childhood her peculiar charm was only nascent. But even at fifteen or sixteen the "scarcely human" grace was appearing, and was strongly attractive to the young males of her own species.
    It was in this period, in fact when Plaxy was sixteen, that Elizabeth suggested to Thomas that it was high time for the child to go to boarding school. The others had gone at a much earlier age. Plaxy had been kept back partly to be an intelligent companion for Sirius. "But now," said Elizabeth, "she's much too wrapped up in him. She won't grow up properly this way. She's cloistered here in this lonely place. She needs to see more of her own kind." Thomas had been secretly planning not to send Plaxy to boarding school at all, partly for Sirius's sake, but also because the other three, he felt, had been rather deadened by it. "Cloistered!" he cried, "what about that damned nunnery where Tamsy was?" Elizabeth admitted that it had turned out rather badly, and added, "Anyhow, I thought we might send Plaxy to a more modern place, preferably co-educational. She doesn't mix enough with the boys."
    Strange, or perhaps not strange at all, that both parents, though consciously modern in outlook, and on friendly terms with their