It was the first time that the men as a group had ever seen in the
flying-girls an exhibition of this feminine faculty. For a moment, they
watched her, deeply interested, as though confronted by an unfamiliar
phenomenon. Then Billy wriggled.
"Say, stop her, somebody," he begged, "I hate to hear a woman cry."
"So do I," said Peter, his face twisted into creases of discomfort.
"She's your girl, Honey. Stop her, for God's sake."
"How's he going to stop her, I'd like to know?" demanded Ralph. "We
don't converse very fluently yet, you know."
"Well, I know how to stop her," said Honey, leaping up. "I say, Lulu,"
he called. "Stop that crying, that's a good girl. It makes us all sick.
I'll find you another mirror in a moment."
Lulu did not stop crying. Perhaps she was not too primitive to realize
that tears are the argument a woman negotiates best. She wailed and wept
assiduously.
Honey, in the meantime, flew to the trunks. He dumped one after another;
clothes flew from either energetic hand like gravel from a shovel.
Suddenly he gave a yell of triumph and brandished - . It was cheap and
brass-bound, but it reflected the sunlight as well as though it had been
framed in massy gold.
"Here you are, Lulu!" he called. He ran down the beach and held it up to
her. Lulu caught the reflection. She dropped sheer. In her eagerness,
she took it from Honey's very hand. And as she seized it, a tear dropped
on his upturned cheek. And as the tear dropped, her face broke into
smiles.
"Well," exclaimed Ralph an instant later, "if I'd had any idea that they
were angels and not females, this would settle the question for me. Good
Lord! Well, you have got a temper, my lady."
It was of Julia he spoke.
For, descending slowly and deliberately, Julia hovered an instant above
a big rock. Then, with a tremendous slashing impulse of a powerful arm,
she hurled her mirror on it. She flew in a very frenzy of haste into the
west.
The girls returned the next morning early.
"After the graft," Ralph commented cynically.
Honey had been rifling the trunks again. He walked down to the beach
with an armful of fans, piled them there, returned to camp. The girls
descended, eyed them, ascended, gathered together, talked, descended,
ascended again.
"What's the row?" Billy asked.
"They don't know what they're for," said Pete. He ran down on to the
beach, seized a fan of feathers, opened it, and stood fanning himself.
Then he put it down and ran back.