"Can hardly, Miss Swift," Peggy mocked. "You are more sensitive to things than I am, I guess. I throw 'em off after I've howled for a while. My idea would be to fill Piggy's bed with flour and hair-brushes, or to stick a hair-pin in his tires. You'd just give him mental treatment and take it awfully to heart."
"I guess that's why we get on so well together. Opposites attract opposites."
"If I were a man I think I should want to marry you, Elizabeth, but if I were a girl, I don't think I should want to be just like you."
"That's not very flattering, because you are a girl already, and you couldn't be a man if you wanted to."
"I mean for myself I would like to be like you. You take things harder than I do. I can always go out and punch something."
"There never seems to be anything I can punch," said poor Elizabeth.
Peggy had walked with her as far as her own gate, and then she had gone in to get her belated morning mail. She had been so sure that there was no one to write to her until she had answered the letters with which her portfolio was stuffed that she had neglected to go to the post office as usual. She found, however, a long letter from her brother and one from her mother. Buddy wrote:
Dear Little Sister:
I am going to take you into my confidence in an important matter because, well, there is nobody else that I can ask any help of. You needn't get peeved at this way of putting it, because it stands to reason that if you weren't a pretty reliable little sport I wouldn't trust you. I don't have to. I only do.—Hope to die, and cross your heart?—Thank you.
Well, the thing is, I want to know something about Ruth Farraday. For reasons of my own I haven't been writing to her. Now, I might like to write to her once or twice, a friendly little note, you understand. A fellow gets so doggone lonesome. They won't let me go until they're satisfied I'm fixed up. How you are going to fix up a fellow who has got some of the things I've got the matter with me, I don't know. They think it's shell shock, among other things. Well, among other things, it isn't shell shock, it's——Oh, well, it isn't shell shock. It's darned old discouragement, and homesickness for the things that never were on land or sea. That's poetry, my darling sister. I have some of that in my system, too.
Well, I've been here alone so long that I want to know everything—everything about the people I care about. Ruth Farraday is one that I do care something about. She was mighty nice to me before I went to be a soldier. I think she would have been nicer if I had worked it around to get a commission instead of just plain enlisting, but this is only just conjecture. She is a beautiful girl, and her heart is in the right place wherever it is, but Sister, that's what I want to know. You're fooling around with the Farradays so much, you ought to get some line on this. I don't want to be idiot enough to start the poor, sick old friend stuff, if she's got her mind all off me or anybody that looks like me, and on somebody that doesn't. Does she wear a ring, and is she reported to be free or cinched, or what?
I can't stand not knowing any longer. That's the point. I may have been a darn fool in the way I've warned you against talking to her about me. I've just had all these notions one after another, kind of feverishly. I'm going to write to her if you advise me to. Don't go making up anything. Tell me the truth. I've got to know it, Kid. I'm just all in—that's all.
Buddy.
She opened her Mothers letter with eyes so full of tears she could scarcely distinguish its import.