One, the elder, was garnishing it artistically with soft leathern fringes, weaving into them the smiling rainbows of her own thought--she being Arline, the Camp Fire Rainbow--which craved a very happy future for this little foreign-born Camp Fire Sister, adopted temporarily by the Morning-Glory Group.
The other, whose needle was threaded with sunbeams and the green of spring, bent her golden head over her embroidery with equal assiduity and sisterhood of interest; a sight which sent Sesooā’s thoughts leaping back to a city playground, crowded with foreign-born children, the cradle of her contact with these two girls from the wealthier avenues of life--Olive and Sybil--whom she, with the racy flame in her for the moment a spitting powder-puff, had scathingly pronounced “all fluff and stuff!”
Well! the early loss of a mother, the spoiling of a bereaved father had, perhaps, rendered their youthful ideals rather fluffy in a downy nest of self.
Three years of Camp Fire life at the most impressionable period, of feelings quickened by a romantic ritual, of heart knit to other girl-heart by the entwining flame of the outdoor Council Fire--of coming, as Olive had said, very near to the Father Heart in which lay their unity--this, and more, had brought one to kneeling, undaunted, by a gassed soldier, the other to embroidering an elm leaf--symbolic American elm--upon the dress of a little immigrant of not two years’ standing.
“Your brother Iver said that it ought to be a laurel leaf for Little Italy,” remarked Olive now, with just the slightest reminiscent quiver of the lip and deepening of color, as she seated herself upon the sands at a safe distance from the camouflaging artist, with her three flashing paint-pots, and drew forth a half-knit stocking from a home-woven bag that was like Joseph’s coat of many colors.
“Laurel leaf! It ought to be that for all our allies!” panted Sesooā, halting in her choice between blue and dark slate-color for her next broad harlequin smear.
“Of course!... The brave Belgians! The women of England! The French--oh! aren’t they wonderful! I had a letter from my cousin, Clayton Forrest, this morning. I wanted to tell you about it. He says the little French women are such--such out-an’-out bricks! He never saw anything like their spirit!” Olive’s dark eyes glowed as she turned the “silver” heel of her stocking for the Red Cross.
“Humph!” grunted Sesooā and daubed passionately, in a blue mood, the discounting energy of her exclamation not being at all leveled at the heroines of sunny France, but at Olive’s male cousins, about whom she quite agreed with her brother Iver, that they were altogether too many and too spectacular for such an attractive girl.
She even pooh-poohed the patriotism of the eighteen-year-old lad, worth a million or two in his own right, who was swinging a mallet now in the country shipbuilding yards not far from here.
“Well! Well, Clay was marching through a deserted French village with his company--they were just straggling along in loose order--when he saw something coming towards him that looked like a great round wicker basket--with the bright handle of a copper saucepan and a turkey-red pillow sticking out over the brim--plodding along of itself on two little clattering wooden shoes.