"Chiquita, on the contrary, isn't sleeping as much as she did," Frank
said. "She's more active, though - physically, I mean. She's rejoicing
at present over the fact that she's lost twenty-five, pounds in the last
three months. She said last night that she hadn't been so slim since she
was a girl."
"Twenty-five pounds!" exclaimed Honey. "That's a good deal to lose. How
the hell - how do you explain it!"
"Increased household activity," Frank replied vaguely. "And then
mentally, I think she's more vigorous. She's been reading a great deal
by herself. Formerly I found that reading annoyed her - even when I read
aloud, explaining carefully as I went along."
"I haven't noticed an increased activity on Julia's part," Billy said
thoughtfully. "But she's always been extraordinarily active, considering
everything. The way she gets about is marvelous. But of course she's
planned the placing of her furniture with that in view. She's as quick
as a cat. I have noticed, however, that she seems much happier. They
certainly are a changed lot of women."
"The twelve o'clock whistle has just blown," Honey announced. "Let's
eat."
The five men dropped their tools. They gathered their lunches together
and fell to a voracious feeding. At last, pipes appeared. They stretched
themselves to the smoker's ease. For a while, the silence was unbroken.
Then, here and there, somebody dropped an irrelevant remark. Nobody
answered it.
They lay in one corner of the big space which had been cleared from the
jungle chaos. On one side rippled the blue lake carving into many tiny
bays and inlets and padded with great green oases of matted lily-leaves.
On the other side rose the highest hill on the island. The cleared land
stretched to the very summit of this hill. Over it lay another chaos,
the chaos of confusion; half-completed buildings of log and stone,
rectangles and squares of dug-up land where buildings would some day
stand, half-finished roadways, ditches of muddy water, hills of round
beach-stones, piles of logs, some stripped of the bark, others still
trailing a green huddle of leaf and branch, tools everywhere. The jungle
rolled like, a tidal wave to the very boundary; in places its green
spume had fallen over the border. As the men smoked, their eyes went
back to the New Camp again and again. It was obvious that constantly
they made mental measurements, that ever in their mind's eye they saw
the completed thing.
"Well," said Ralph, reverting without warning to the subject under
discussion. His manner tacitly assumed that the others had also been
considering it mentally. "I confess I don't understand women really.
I've always thought that I did. But I see now that I never have."
Addington's rare outbursts of frankness in regard to the other sex were
the more startling because they contrasted so sharply with his normal
attitude of lordly understanding and contempt. "I've been a good manager
and I'm not saying that I haven't had my successes with them. But as I
look back upon them now, I realize I followed my intuitions, not my
reason. I've done what I've done without knowing why. I have to feel my
way still. I can't account for the change that's come over them. For
four years now they've been at us to let their wings grow again. And for
four years we've been saying no in every possible tone of voice and with
every possible inflection. I've had no idea that Peachy would ever get
over it. My God, you fellows have no idea what I've been through with
her in regard to this question of flying. Why, one night three months
ago, she had an awful attack of hysteria because I told her I'd have to
cut Angela's wings as soon as she was grown-up."