“Oh, don’t do that, it’s so—so nice,” not daring to say how adorable he thought she was in it. “I like it the way you have it now. I never knew sun-bonnets could be so frilled and furbelowed.”
“It is Nannie’s—she is making Julie and me each one. She says they are a fad this year. They are pretty, aren’t they? But somehow they feel hot and then I just tie the strings loose and let it hang down my back like that. Cousin Nancy says a girl who will do that has absolutely no regard for her complexion. It would be funny, wouldn’t it, if I took to worrying about things like that? Why, where is George Washington? Gone? And you’re shockingly lazy! You haven’t picked a berry since you came!”
“I—I beg your pardon,” scarcely able to take his eyes off her, “I really mean to help.”
“How is Captain Loomis?” she asked, seeing that he seemed unable to do much of anything but stare at her. “Have you seen him to-day?”
“That little Virginian? He haunts our camp and talks to me by the hour about you! He is madly in love with you.”
“He is too silly to be anything else,” munching a berry.
“I do not like your way of putting it.”
“I mean,” she explained, swinging her sun-bonnet by one string, “that he does not know how to be sensible and I do not like him well enough to bother to teach him, so, as he is around a good deal I have to politely put up with him. I should think you knew me well enough by this time to know how I hate silly people.”
“Do you ever politely put up with me?”
“Sometimes,” teasingly.