Excerpt
CHAPTER IA FLASH OF FIRE
Filled was the room with boys and girls–yes, literally filled; for they moved about so from chair to chair, from divan to sofa, from one side of the apartment to the other, now and then changing corners after the manner of the old-fashioned game of “puss,” that what they lacked in numbers they more than made up in activity. It was a veritable moving picture of healthful, happy young persons. And the talk―!
Questions and answers flew back and forth like tennis balls in a set of doubles. Repartee mingled with delicate sarcasm, and new, and almost indefinable shades of meaning were given to old and trite expressions.
“You can depend upon it, Sis!” drawled Jack Kimball as he stretched out his foot to see how far he could reach on the Persian rug without falling off his chair; “you can depend upon it that Belle will shy at the last moment. She’s afraid of water, the plain, common or garden variety of water. And when it comes to ripples, to say nothing of waves, she―”
“Cora, can’t you make him behave?” demanded the plump Belle in question.
“Belle’s too–er–too–tired to get up and do it herself,” scoffed Ed Foster. “May I oblige you, Belle, and tweak his nose for him?”
“Come and try it!” challenged Jack.
“Let Walter do it,” advised Bess, who, the very opposite type of her sister Belle, tall and willowy–æsthetic in a word–walked to another divan over which she proceeded to “drape herself,” as Cora expressed it.
“Well, let’s hear what Jack has to say,” proposed Walter Pennington, bringing his head of crisp brown hair a little closer to the chestnut one of Bess. “He has made a statement, and it is now–will you permit me to say it–it is now strictly up to him to prove it. Say on, rash youth, and let us hear why it is that Belle will shy at the water.”
“It’s a riddle, perhaps,” suggested Eline Carleton, a visitor from Chicago. “I love to guess riddles! Say it again, Jack, do!”
“Why is a raindrop―” began Norton Randolf, a newcomer in Chelton. “The answer is―”
“That you can bring water to a horse, even if you can’t make him stand still without hitching,” interrupted Walter. “Go on, Jack!”
“I don’t see much use in going on, if you fellows–and I beg your collective pardons–the ladies also–are to interrupt me all the while.”
“That’s so–let’s play the game fair,” suggested Eline. “Is it a riddle, Jack? Belle is afraid of the water because–let me see–because it can’t spoil her complexion no matter whether it’s salt or fresh–is that it?” and she glanced over at the slightly pouting Belle, whose rosy complexion was often the envy of less happily endowed girls.
“I’m not afraid of the water!” declared Belle. “I don’t see why he says so, anyhow. It–it isn’t–kind.”
“Forgive me, Belle!” and Jack “slumped” from his chair to his knees before the offended one. “I do beg your pardon, but you know that ever since we proposed this auto trip to Sandy Point Cove you’ve hung back on some pretext or other. You’ve even tried to get us to consent to a land trip. But, in the language of the immortal Mr. Shakespeare, there is nothing doing. We are going to the coast.”
“Of course I’m coming, too,” said Belle. “Stop it, Jack!” she commanded, drawing her plump hand away from his brown palm. “Behave yourself! Only,” she went on, as the others ceased laughing, “only sometimes the ocean seems so–so―”
“Oceany,” supplied Walter.
“Now Jack–and you other boys also,” said Cora in firm tones, “really it isn’t fair. Belle is nervous about water, just as the rest of us are about some other particular bugbear, but she is also reasonable, and she has even promised to learn to swim.”
Cora brushed from the mahogany centre table a few morsels of withered lilac petals, for, in spite of the most careful dusting and setting to rights of the room, those blooms had a persistent way of dropping off....