"Tired, Marian?" said Anne Lester.
"Dead!" Marian answered. She rearranged the packages, took off her coat, put it on again, and began to walk restlessly up and down the deck.
"She lives on sheer nerve," Anne remarked. "Never relaxes." Her own long, thoroughbred body was a picture of reposeful lines. She said nothing more.
"How beautifully they let each other alone!" Helen thought, and in the restful silence she too relaxed, idly studying the others. They all worked. Beyond that she could see nothing in common; even their occupations differed widely. She checked them off, startled a little at the incongruity.
Anne, high-bred, imperious, with something of untamed freedom in every gesture—Anne was a teacher of economics! Beside her Willetta, demure, brown-eyed, brown-haired, knitting busily, had come from unknown labors in social service work. Across the aisle Sara and Mrs. Austin—they called her Dodo—were discussing samples of silk. And Sara was a miniature painter, Dodo executive secretary of an important California commission.
"I give it up!" Helen said to herself, marvelling again at the obvious affection that held them together. Turning her face to the keen cool wind blowing in through the Golden Gate she watched the thousand white-capped waves upon the bay and the flight of silvery-gray seagulls against a glowing sunset sky, drinking in the beauty of it all without thinking, letting the day's burden of effort slip from her.
Around the camp-fire on the white half-moon of beach beyond the fisherman's village of Tiburon the talk awoke again, idle talk, flippant, serious, bantering, dropping now and then into silence.
Sara sat on a bit of driftwood, her long, sensitive hands clasped around her knees, her eyes full of dreams. "How beautiful it is!" she said at intervals, lifting her face to the dark sky full of stars, or indicating with a nod the lights flung over the Berkeley hills like handfuls of jewels. Anne, stretched on the sand, spoke with passion of labor unions and I. W. W.'s, of strikes and lockouts, and the red glimmer of her cigarette sketched her gestures upon the darkness. Argument raged between her and Dodo, cross-legged like a boy, her fine, soft hair let down upon her shoulders. Hot words were exchanged. "Oh, you don't know what you're—" "If you'd read the reports of your own commission!" "Let me tell you, Anne Lester,—where are the matches?" The twinkling flame lighted Dodo's calm, unruffled brow as a thin curl of smoke came from her serious lips. "Just let me tell you, Anne Lester—" In the circle of fire-light Marian was busily gathering up paper napkins, bits of string, wrapping paper. "Marian's got to tidy the whole sea-shore!" they laughed, reaching lazily to help her. After a long silence they spoke of the war.
"It didn't get me so much at first—it was like an earthquake shock. But lately—" "One feels like doing something. I know. What is a little Red Cross work here at home, when you think—"
"Oh, it's all too horrible!" Sara cried.