“Gone glimmering! I haven’t even a glimmer left,” sighed fair-haired Sybil, the Maid’s sister, gazing down at her round arm, bare from the elbow, which had twinkled as a galaxy--radio-painted--the night before. “Too much fun yesterday; it’s taken the ‘pep’ out of me--burnt it all away. I--I’d rather do anything than thin out these saucy beets, anyway; they’re so red-faced and flouncing, they--they just seem to giggle at you in the sun, when you’re tired and your back aches, and you don’t want to keep on.”
“Yes, like horrid--bold--florid-faced girls; to-day I just want to smack every one that I pull up!” finished Lilia crossly. “I don’t mind grubbing in this sandy war-garden, when it’s an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon, but to put in the whole time, or most of it--two hours and a half, anyway--at a stretch, because we want to take it easy, later, and make ready for the Council Fire--why, that’s too much. I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while!”
It was the same all over the broad semi-cultivated acres of lonely hillside. Everywhere courage had gone glimmering, or flickered out altogether.
Of the seventeen girls at work--two of the campers having been left at home to prepare dinner: Arline, whose symbolic rainbow was never more needed, and Betty, the evergreen Holly--not one was now carrying on, or, if at all, very lamely.
A distant trio who had been raking over the earth around the vegetables, in order to renew the mulch--surface muck--and draw the moisture to that sandy surface--had, together with other unpaid volunteers whose tedious task was to fight insect pests with noxious tobacco-water, thrown down their arms ignominiously, and sat down under a crooked tree, to chat.
“An infant carrot is, sure, a funny-looking thing; this one has a tail like a wood-mouse, only pink,” lazily moralized Sul-sul-sul-i, meaning Redstart--Little Fire--here, in this work-a-day field, Victoria Glenn. “I wonder how such a terra-cotta baby tastes--raw? Bah! Horrid!”
“I don’t care what anybody says; I’m going to rest a while.”
She bit into the vegetable baby and threw it from her, repeating the experiment, in “loafing” fashion, with another, and yet another.
“Why! you mustn’t waste them. We can cook those for our own use--save the winners to sell for the Red Cross--and to feed others. Oh! Oh! you’re not giving out, too, are you--Victory?”