“Lovely!” responded Olive, meaning the idea, not the setter-forth thereof, although Penelope looked a very different Pen from the gaudy tomboy of the gate; no human hurricane could be a hurricane in ceremonial dress; there was a poetry about the leather fringes, the soft hue of the brown khaki, the shimmering head-band and embroidered moccasins which chastened the commonness of Penny’s speech.
To-night her clothes did not “talk” to you afar off; they thrilled you with a sense of some romance recovered which the world had lost a while.
And no setting for them could have been more perfect than the white beach and sand-hills, gleaming like lesser Alps, of the Sugarloaf Peninsula, flushed pink by the sunset.
“Oh! isn’t it all too beautiful?” breathed Olive who had a chord in her heart that vibrated with a joy as of heaven to Nature’s beauty, as she linked her fringed arm through Penelope’s, feeling a twinge of regret for the silent rebuff which the latter’s rude tongue had brought upon her earlier in the day; this feeling it was which prompted Olive to be her wood-gathering companion now, in collecting juniper and driftage from among the burnished dunes.
She might have had a worse companion than Penelope, for the tingling Penny, though her junior, was much the better climber of the two, and it was toilsome work, ploughing up well-nigh perpendicular sand-peaks, sometimes, through a jungle of vegetation that snared one’s every step.
“Don’t get into that thatch-grass, Cask!” warned Penelope; “I did the other day and was bitten by a thatch-spider; it poisoned me something aw-ful!”
“Spiders! Thatch-spiders! Ugh-h.” Olive shuddered at the rank dull-green thatch of one sand-hill, whose ungainliness seemed to have something in common with Penelope’s speech. “You don’t pronounce my Camp Fire name properly,” she said after a minute during which she had given the spider-breeding thatch-grass a wide berth. “You call me ‘Cask’: the a ought to be longer and softer in Kask; that’s the Indian for Blue Heron, the Penobscot Indian.”
“I think it’s a star name, Cask,” murmured Penelope, giving the title exactly the same intonation as before. “And you’ve got your symbolic name nailed onto you all right, Olive, because you’ve already been initiated as a Wood Gatherer and taken rank among the Camp Fire Girls,” glancing at the fagot ring on Olive’s little finger. “I haven’t; I’m only on probation, although they don’t ‘stump’ from wearing the ceremonial dress and being called by the Indian name that I’ve chosen: Awatawéssu; that’s Penobscot, too.”
The poetry of the name which even Pen’s pronunciation could not mar was so at variance with Penelope’s slangy speech that the Blue Heron, poised on a white sand-peak, her fringed arms outspread in their loose sleeves, as if she were about to take wing through the joy-filled universe, had to laugh.
“Oh! Penny, you’re too funny,” she said. “Yours is really a star name,” dreamily, “for it means ‘a star,’ doesn’t it?”