"You bet she is," Howard agreed, and began to talk about shells.
When they had finished the last scrap of dessert, the young man put what was left of his beer on the mantelpiece, and, his pipe drawing well, stood up with his back to the fire, and told her about the pearl he had found.
"I want to show it to you," he said; and, digging it up out of his pocket, dropped it into her extended hand. "I'm going to have it set in a—a ring," he explained, as it lay, round and shimmering, in Fred's palm. "Of course, I could buy a bigger one, and more perfect. But there's a kind of association in a pearl you pick up yourself—don't you think?"
"Of course there is!"
"Put it there, on your finger, and let's see how it looks," he said, his head on one side, his eyes anxious. She balanced it as well as she could on the back of her hand, then returned it to him hurriedly. "Pretty good?" he said.
"Fine!" she assured him. Then, resolutely, changed the subject; there must be no talk about rings—yet!
Howard, a little disappointed at her indifference, put the pearl, in its wisp of tissue-paper, into his pocket, and listened to the outpouring of her plans for the winter work of the league. In the midst of it, he kicked the logs together in the fireplace, and, sitting down, smoked comfortably. Once he said that one of her arguments was bully, and once he called her attention to the way the sparks marched and countermarched in the soot on the chimney back; "I used to call 'em 'soldiers' when I was a kid."
"I meant to read you my paper," Fred was saying, "but I guess it will keep. Let's talk. Howard, Laura and I are going to get all the girls we know to take a stand—this is a pretty serious thing!—against playing around with men we know are dissipated. The idea grew out of this bill we're trying to get before the Legislature."
"Good work!" he said, lazily, and leaned forward to knock the ashes out of his pipe. Zip yawned and curled up on the skirt of Freddy's dress. It was a warm, domestic scene, full of peaceful certainties.