To-night, again, the experiment was an exciting success, for expense had not been spared on the “outfit” installed in this mountain camp by Mr. Grosvenor for the diversion and development of summering girls—his own rather ineffectual daughter among them—and at the laboratory end, a hundred miles away, was a powerful sending station.
As the girl pulled her switches, after good-nights had been exchanged through the air, with much badinage of “Y. L.” “O. M.” and jokes about hearing with the phones on the table when they were over her straining ears, Pemrose Lorry turned to her young knight and abettor, Treff Graham, with the white light, just shut off from the bulbs, switched on in her eyes.
“Father—father says we can get the wherewithal at Roslyn College,” she cried mysteriously. “He’ll telephone to one of his friends who’s conducting a summer school there. And it’s only seventy miles away. But—” anxiously—“could you go and come in the same day? The Flower Pageant will be to-morrow evening.”
“Yes, and that would be a ‘peach’ of a time to loose the pipes. Crowning feature! Seventy miles! Why that’s only a little hop,” protested the youth blithely. “I’ll be back with the pibroch, sleeping pibroch, in the tail of the plane.”
CHAPTER XVII
Wild Flowers
“Wake up, wake up, to greet the day!
Is what the morning glories say
And open at the sun’s first ray.”
It was Una, a bell-shaped white flower, striped with pink, the light, filmy costume divided into the three-lobed corolla and five-sepaled calyx of the erratic little wild flower which, in traveling, always goes in a contrary direction to its sun-god, although it rises with him—Una, trailing triangular green leaves, who came floating on to the outdoor stage.
Spectators wildly cheered the girl Morning Glory as she flung her green tendrils over a rock, symbol of beauty, indigenous beauty, to eyes tired with fighting Nature for a farm-hold in a region where Mother Earth seemed at times to set her foot down grimly and say: “Here, I don’t want men, houses, corn fields; I want my uncut forests, boulders—untamed mountains.”