“I wonder,” said Donald, “how it comes that I have lived all my life in California, and to-day it seems to me that most of the worthwhile things I know about her I owe to you. When I go to college this winter the things I shall be telling the boys will be how I could gain a living, if I had to, on the desert, in Death Valley, from the walls of Multiflores Canyon; and how the waves go to smash on the rocks of Laguna, not to mention cactus fish hooks, mescal sticks, and brigand beefsteak. It’s no wonder the artists of all the world come here copying these pictures. It’s no wonder they build these bungalows and live here for years, unsatisfied with their efforts to reproduce the pictures of the Master Painter of them all.”
“I wonder,” said Linda, “if anybody is very easily satisfied. I wonder to-day if Eileen is satisfied with being merely rich. I wonder if we are satisfied to have this golden day together. I wonder if the white swallows are satisfied with the sea. I wonder if those rocks are satisfied and proud to stand impregnable against the constant torment of the tide.”
“I wonder, oh, Lord, how I wonder,” broke in Donald, “about Katherine O’Donovan’s lunch box. If you want a picture of per feet satisfaction, Belinda beloved, lead me to it!”
“Thank heaven you’re mistaken,” she said; “they spared me the ‘Be’—. It’s truly just ‘Linda.’”
“Well, I’m not sparing you the ‘Be—’,” said Donald, busy with the fastenings of the lunch basket. “Did you hear where I used it?”
“Yes, child, and I like it heaps,” said Linda casually. “It’s fine to have you like me. Awfully proud of myself.”
“You have two members of our family at your feet,” said Donald soberly as he handed her packages from the box. “My dad is beginning to discourse on you with such signs of intelligence that I am almost led to believe, from some of his wildest outbursts, that he has had some personal experience in some way.”
“And why not?” asked Linda lightly. “Haven’t I often told you that my father constantly went on fishing and hunting trips, that he was a great collector of botanical specimens, that he frequently took his friends with him? You might ask your father if he does not recall me as having fried fish and made coffee and rendered him camp service when I was a slip of a thing in the dawn of my teens.”
“Well, he didn’t just mention it,” said Donald, “but I can easily see how it might have been.”
After they had finished one of Katy’s inspired lunches, in which a large part of the inspiration had been mental on Linda’s part and executive on Katy’s, they climbed rock faces, skirted wave-beaten promontories, and stood peering from overhanging cliffs dipping down into the fathomless green sea, where the water boiled up in turbulent fury. Linda pointed out the rocks upon which she would sit, if she were a mermaid, to comb the seaweed from her hair. She could hear the sea bells ringing in those menacing depths, but Donald’s ears were not so finely tuned. At the top of one of the highest cliffs they climbed, there grew a clump of slender pale green bushes, towering high above their heads with exquisitely cut blue-green leaves, lance shaped and slender. Donald looked at the fascinating growth appraisingly.