Treff was airing his humor upon Una—his cousin—just now.
“Say! oughtn’t they to be tried first on the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals?” he suggested, pointing to a rough sheet of tin, dotted with little creamy mushrooms of batter, which Una, supported by Naomi, was slipping on to a red-hot iron grating between the stone arms of the fireplace.
“The biscuits you mean? Seeing Una mixed them!” Pemrose blinked at the two.
Treff nodded. “The surprise to me is that she’s ‘sticking it’, at all, as we fellows say,” he muttered, staring critically at his dark-eyed cousin, a white rose when she started upon this camping trip, a red carnation now. “The touch of hardship in the first days’ camping, before you reached here, hiking, sleeping out at night!” he rambled on. “A girl, like her, brought up in a flower-pot! If it had been a boy, he’d have kicked the pot to pieces long ago.”
“That’s what she’s doing now—trying to do,” broke in Pemrose. “She still has her worry-cows,” laughingly, “foolish fears, but she’s ‘sticking it’ at cooking and camp lessons—even at code, telegraphy, that horrid teaser, to her,” with a little shrug, “just because her father asked it. And—and she wouldn’t be Una without her little ‘crinkams’,” merrily.
“Her ‘fancy’ curves with a trimming of blue funk!” The boy’s lips were pursed. “She never could pull herself out of any mess.”
“She pulled Donnie away from Cartoon’s heels.”
“Bah! That was a mere flash, a fluke; it surprised herself more than anybody else.” He blinked through the bushes at his cousin. “The trouble with her”—the young aviator whistled shrewdly—“is that she has just been wheeled through life in a cushioned chair—and she always will be. If anything happened to the chair, she’d just—drop through,” with a collapsing shrug.
“But she’s the dearest girl, for all that!” fired up Pemrose. “Think of this pageant—party—she’s giving for the mountain people to-morrow night—her birthday, you know! She has been planning it for ages, a lovely Wild Flower Pageant, to be given in our open-air theatre,” grandly, “down the mountain, where a grassy bank forms a natural stage, with trees for a background. And our dresses—if they aren’t fetching!”
“I’ll say so—when I see them,” murmured the lad, with a fervent glance.