While they talked, Bessie and Dolly were not idle, by any means. There was plenty of work for everyone to do, for the fire had made a pretty clean sweep, after all, and to put the whole camp in good shape, so that they could sleep there that night, was something of a task.
Trenwith and Jamieson, laughing a good deal, and enjoying themselves immensely, insisted on doing the heavy work of setting up the ridge poles, and laying down the floors of the new tents, but when it came to stretching the canvas over the framework, they were not in it with the girls.
“You men mean well, but I never saw anything so clumsy in my life!” declared Eleanor, laughingly. “It’s a wonder to me how you ever come home alive when you go out camping by yourselves.”
“Oh, we manage somehow,” boasted Charlie Jamieson.
“That’s just about what you do do! You manage–somehow! And, yet, when this Camp Fire movement started, all the men I knew sat around and jeered, and said that girls were just jealous of the good times the Boy Scouts had, and predicted that unless we took men along to look after us, we’d be in all sorts of trouble the first time we ever undertook to spend a night in camp!”
Charlie shook his head at Trenwith in mock alarm.
“Getting pretty independent, aren’t they?” he said to his friend. “You mark my words, Billy, the old-fashioned women don’t exist any more!”
“And it’s a good thing if they don’t!” Eleanor flashed back at him. “They do, though, only you men don’t know the real thing when you see it. You have an idea that a woman ought to be helpless and clinging. Maybe that was all right in the old days, when there were always plenty of men to look after a woman. But how about the way things are now? Women have to go into shops and offices and factories to earn a living, don’t they, just the way men do?”
“They do–more’s the pity!” said Trenwith.
Eleanor looked at him as if she understood just what he meant.