"Join the Land Army! Me!"
"Yes, you. Do your bit. They say England wants feeding. It looks like it"—she glanced at the comfortless tray—"so go and help, Joan."
"Would you like to, yourself?" I retorted.
"Me?" cried Elizabeth in turn. "Nothing would induce me, thanks. I should loathe it!"
"Yet you think I ought to join up!"
"Best thing for you," declared my chum briskly. "Help your country, work in the open, get fit, and forget there are such things as men!"
"All very well for you to talk in that gay and airy way about 'forgetting,'" I retorted, nettled again. "You wait——! If ever your time comes——"
"Ha!" jeered Elizabeth, putting back her bonnie little head of a page, and squaring her shoulders. "If——!"
She looked like the Princess of that fairy-tale on whom the fairies laid a curse that she should never marry a man she loved because, on her bridal night, she herself would be turned into a lad.
"Stranger things have happened," I threatened her, "than a girl like you falling in love in the end."