“If your word is as big as your mouth I guess it will be,” said Felicity cruelly.
“I pity the man who gets you, Felicity King, that’s all,” retorted Dan.
“Now, don’t fight,” implored Cecily.
“Who’s fighting?” demanded Dan. “Felicity thinks she can say anything she likes to me, but I’ll show her different.”
Probably, in spite of Cecily’s efforts, a bitter spat would have resulted between Dan and Felicity, had not a diversion been effected at that moment by the Story Girl, who came slowly down Uncle Stephen’s Walk.
“Just look how the Story Girl has got herself up!” said Felicity. “Why, she’s no more than decent!”
The Story Girl was barefooted and barearmed, having rolled the sleeves of her pink gingham up to her shoulders. Around her waist was twisted a girdle of the blood-red roses that bloomed in Aunt Olivia’s garden; on her sleek curls she wore a chaplet of them; and her hands were full of them.
She paused under the outmost tree, in a golden-green gloom, and laughed at us over a big branch. Her wild, subtle, nameless charm clothed her as with a garment. We always remembered the picture she made there; and in later days when we read Tennyson’s poems at a college desk, we knew exactly how an oread, peering through the green leaves on some haunted knoll of many fountained Ida, must look.
“Felicity,” said the Story Girl reproachfully, “what have you been doing to Peter? He’s up there sulking in the granary, and he won’t come down, and he says it’s your fault. You must have hurt his feelings dreadfully.”
“I don’t know about his feelings,” said Felicity, with an angry toss of her shining head, “but I guess I made his ears tingle all right. I boxed them both good and hard.”