"Isn't what lovely, your complexion?" he answered, just to tease her, for Rufe loves the outdoors as much as any of us, and if Waterloo takes after his mother and father both, he will never sleep in anything more civilized than a wigwam.
"Don't joke," she said. "It's too beautiful—and too fleeting! Just think, in another week we'll be back, dwelling with the rest of the fools amid the tall buildings!"
"It is everything you say," he answered soberly, looking in the direction she pointed, and he seemed to have that happy, hurting feeling that comes to you when you look at Lord Byron's picture, or smell lilies-of-the-valley.
"Don't you feel light on a morning like this?" Cousin Eunice said again, still looking at the hills. "Couldn't you do anything?"
"Anything!" he echoed. "Even push my paper to the hundred thousand mark—or carry a message to Garcia."
"Especially the message to Garcia! Now couldn't you?" she said with a bright smile. "I could do that myself, without even mussing up my white linen blouse!"
Miss Claxton looked up at them with a puzzled look, and Rufe and Cousin Eunice unhitched hands.
"Miss Claxton," Rufe began with a half-teasing twinkle in his eyes (I had heard father telling him a while ago about Miss Claxton being a knocker), "this little affair about the message to Garcia happened a bit this side of the Eocene age, so maybe you haven't bothered your head about it. I might explain that——"
"Nobody asked you to, sir," she said, with such a rainbow of a smile at him that I was surprised. If she could smile like that at a married man what would she do at a single one? "I know a lot more things than I look to—with my glasses on! That carrying the message to Garcia was a brave thing to do, even aside from the risks. It is heroic to do the thing at hand. I'm trying to learn that lesson myself. I'm being a schoolmarm and wearing glasses to look like one, instead of following my natural bent in the scientific field," she wound up, still smiling.
"What's your ambition?" Cousin Eunice said, looking at her wonderingly.