"Fluffy! it was nothing of the kind!"
"Well, you know what I mean, Snowy; don't make a cannibal meal of me. Scarlet was Elaine's colour, and Launcelot wore it; that was what I meant."
"I thought—" said Peggy, timidly, "I thought she was the Lily Maid; I thought she wore white."
"Did, herself," said the Snowy, with her mouth full of tacks. "But she gave him a scarlet sleeve embroidered with pearls, and he wore it on his helmet, and that was what made Guinevere throw the diamonds into the river."
"Oh!" said Peggy, meekly. She had tried to read the "Idyls of the King," but could not make out much except the fighting parts.
"Never understood why they had sleeves so often," said Bertha, abstractedly bunching the green and white draperies. "Never could see how they got the sleeve on the helmet in any kind of shape. What sort of sleeves did they have then, anyhow? Why, they were those tight ones, weren't they, with a slashed cap at the top? Well, now, Snowy, that would look perfectly absurd on a helmet, you know it would."
The Snowy deigned no reply; or perhaps the tacks were in a perilous position at that moment. Bertha went on, thoughtfully:
"A balloon sleeve, now, would be more sensible; you could slip it over the helmet, and it would look like—like the shade of a piano lamp. But somehow, whenever I read about it, I see a small, tight, red sleeve, spread out like a red flannel bandage, as if the helmet had a sore throat—"
"Fluffy, you are talking absolute nonsense!" said Gertrude, regaining utterance. "And after all, they had gloves oftener than sleeves; not that that makes it much better. For my part, I always think of a glove with all the five fingers sticking up out of the middle of the crown, as if they had tried to be feathers and been nipped in the bud."
"Feathers don't bud!" said Bertha, handing up more slack.