“Bah!” Convulsively her little teeth bit into her lower lip as she adjusted the telescope portion of the instrument for analyzing light–reducing it to prismatic hues–a little.
And now, lo! a world brilliantly jaundiced–her orange–the snow being a wonderful reflector of the sun’s divided rays.
“Father! Father-r! I used to love Una Grosvenor. Now I h-hate her! If her mother made that hor-rid speech about a Quaker gun, she repeated it, before all the boys and girls in our Drama Class, too! If I see her this afternoon at the Ski Club, the skiing party out at Poplar Hill, I shan’t speak to her. And we used to be so chummy! Why–” the girl fluttered now, a green weathercock, upon the two-foot platform–“why, we used to stand side by side and measure eyelashes, to see which pair was going to be the longer. I’ll wager mine are now!”
With a veering laugh the weathercock was here bent forward, striving to catch some brazen glimpse of a winking profile in the polished brass of the spectroscope.
Her father laughed: this was the Rose side of her–of his maiden of the patchwork name–the Rose side of her, and he loved it!
“But–but Poplar Hill! Poplar Hill! Why! that’s away outside the city line–out at Merryville,” he exclaimed, a minute later, in consternation. “Goodness! child, you’re not going off there to ski to-day–in a zero world, everything snowbound, no trolley cars running?”
“Oh! the trains–the trains aren’t held up, father.” The coaxing weathercock now had a green arm around the neck of the man in the long, drab coat. “And I just couldn’t give up going! I’m becoming such a daring ski-runner, Daddy-man; you’ll be proud of me when you see! Why! I can almost herring-bone uphill; and I’m getting the kick-turn ‘down fine.’ Darting, gliding, stemming, jumping downhill–oh! it’s such perfect fun, such creamy fun; I’m not a girl any longer, I’m just a swallow.”
“One swallow doesn’t make a summer; all this doesn’t change the weather.” The inventor glanced anxiously through a window.
“No, but it’s such a very short train-run. Pouf! only six miles on the two o’clock express bound north, why–why! the very train that you and I will be taking, later, Daddy-man, along in May, when you try out experiments with that little model rocket you’re working on now, upon old Mount Greylock–highest mountain of the State. Oh-h! if ever a girl’s thumb itched, mine does to press the little electric button and start it off, to fly up a couple of hundred miles, or so, to send you back your golden egg, siree–the first record from space. Oh! through all the fun of slope and snow I’ll be thinking of that the entire time to-day–the whole, enduring, livelong time. Yes!”