From the playground came the cooing words of yet another song, dramatic, disconnected, marking the close of the afternoon’s singing games and folk-dances:
“Bluebird, bluebird, through my window!”
“Oh, Jennie, I’m tired!”
At the two random lines, children’s heads were dropped each upon the other’s shoulder in mock fatigue, resting there a moment in drowsy confidence.
“Turk, Armenian, Teuton, Slav, an’ almost every other race thrown in—Lord! if that ain’t a Peace Conference to beat the Hague,” muttered Captain Andy, his eyes watering as they scanned the faces of those foreign buds.
“I think he’s great—and I don’t mean it slangily either! He is Great,” said impulsive Sally in an aside to Olive. “Oh! why don’t Sybil and you join our Camp Fire tribe and camp with us, too, upon his Sugarloaf dunes. I feel like shouting when I think of the fun we’ll have, rowing and swimming, singing and dancing our Indian dances, the Leaf Dance and Duck Dance that Morning-Glory is going to teach us—she learned them from a professor who learned them from the Indians—among those crystal, sugary, sandy dunes.”
“Yes, and cooking your own meals, by turns, laundering your own blouses, washing camp dishes—glorifying work, as you call it! That wouldn’t suit me.” Olive shook her satin curl. “Sybil and I—with Cousin Anne, of course—are going to spend August at an hotel on the North Shore. We’ll have plenty of dancing, too; it’s a very fashionable, exclusive hotel and the most expensive teacher of up-to-date dances is coming from New York to give lessons to the guests, including Sybil and me; I teased Father until he said we might learn from him—otherwise, we shan’t have a study or a thing to do but to amuse ourselves all day long.”
The bright flame of Sally’s enthusiasm wavered and paled like a candle-flame in garish sunshine. Her face fell. To her versatile, girlish fancy the picture which Olive painted of the coming August was richer in coloring, more dazzlingly gilded in frame—with the modern dancing thrown in—than any that the crystal Sugarloaf could offer, even when peopled with fringed and beaded Camp Fire Girls.
Crestfallen, she looked at Captain Andy, partly to hide her chagrin.
He was staring fixedly at the playground before him, where a dumb child unable to reach up and drop her head upon a seventeen-year-old girl’s lavender shoulder—as the other children were doing with their partners—laid it upon her breast.