“But you never know where they are,” said Gladys. “If you don’t keep your things in order you might as well not own them, for you never have them when you want them anyway.”
“And if you do keep them in order somebody else always borrows them and then you don’t have them when you want them either,” said Sahwah.
“Life is awfully complicated, isn’t it?” sighed Gladys.
“I should say it was awfully simple,” said Sahwah, 148 laughing at Gladys’s solemn tone. “No matter what you do it turns out the same way anyway. I shouldn’t call that complicated.”
Gladys hung her handkerchiefs on the tent ropes where they would dry in the wind and emptied the basin of water out of the end of the tent, which opened directly on the bluff. A dismal shriek from below proclaimed that somebody had received a shower bath. Gladys and Sahwah leaned over the tent railing at a perilous angle and peered down. Half way down the bluff, “between the devil and the deep sea,” as Sahwah remarked, sat Katherine on a narrow ledge of rock, dangling her feet over the edge and leaning her head dejectedly on her hands. The descending flood had landed on her head and was running in streams over her face from the ends of her wispy hair, making her look more dejected than ever. Her appearance made both the girls above think immediately of Fifi on the occasion of his memorable bath.
“Oh, Katherine, I’m sorry,” said Gladys contritely. “I ought to have looked before I poured. But I never expected anybody to be sitting there like a fly on the wall. What are you doing there anyway?”
“Just sitting,” replied Katherine in her huskiest tones.
“What’s the matter?” asked Gladys, catching the doleful note in her voice and having inward qualms.
149“Just low in my mind,” replied Katherine lugubriously.
“Goodness gracious!” exclaimed Gladys. “What about? Can’t we come down and cheer you up? Is there room for two more on that ledge?”