"I've seen islanders weave cloth out of palm fibre—most any kind," I said. "It's clumsy and airy; but if you think it would do——"
"It sounds scratchy."
"It is, but it's good for the circulation."
Well, we made a kind of cloth and cut it into shapes, and knotted the shapes together with more fibre; then we folded up our best and only Sunday-go-to-meeting suits and put the fibre things on; and then we went down to the cove to look at ourselves in the water. And Ivy laughed.
"We're not clothed," she said; "we're thatched; and yet—and yet—it's accident, of course, but this skirt has got a certain hang that——"
"Whatever that skirt's got," I said, "these pants haven't; but if you're happy I am."
Well, there's worse situations than desert-islanding it with the one woman in the world. I even know one man who claims he was cast away with a perfect stranger that he hated the sight of at first—a terribly small-minded, conventional woman—and still he had the time of his life. They got to like each other over a mutual taste for cribbage, which they played for sea-shells, yellow with a pink edge, until the woman went broke and got heavily in debt to the man. He was nice about it and let her off. He says the affair must have ended in matrimony, only she took a month to think it over; during that month they were picked up and carried to Honolulu; then they quarrelled and never saw each other again.
"Ivy," said I one day, "we'll be picked up by a passing steamer some day, of course, but meanwhile I'd rather be here with you than any place I can name."
"It's Eden," she said, "and I'd like to live like this always. But——"