Angel Island

And Chiquita she became.

Chiquita was beautiful. Her beauty had a highwayman quality of violence;

it struck quick and full in the face. She was the darkest of all the

girls, a raven black. As Lulu was all coppery shine and shimmer, all

satiny gloss and gleam, so Chiquita was all dusk in the coloring, all

velvet in the surfaces. Her great heavy-lidded eyes were dusk and

velvet, with depth on depth of an unmeaning dreaminess. Her hair, brows,

lashes were dusk and velvet; and there was no light in them. Her skin, a

dusky cream on which velvety shade accented velvety shadow, was

colorless except where her lips, cupped like a flower, offered a splash

of crimson. Yet, in spite of the violence of her beauty, her expression

held a tropical languor. Indeed, had not her flying compelled a

superficial vigor from her, she would have seemed voluptuous.

Chiquita wore scarlet always, the exact scarlet of her wings, a clinging

mass of tropical bloom; huge star-shaped or lilly-like flowers whose

brilliant lustre accentuated her dusky coloring.

They had no sooner accustomed themselves to the incongruity of Frank

Merrill's conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy

developed what Honey called "a case." It was scarcely a question of

development; for with Pete it had been the "thin one" from the

beginning. Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her

Clara - and Clara she ultimately became. Among themselves, the men

employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with

Pete. To Ralph she was "the cat"; to Billy, "the poser"; to Honey,

"Carrots."

Clara appeared first with Lulu. She did not stay long on her initial

visit. But afterwards she always accompanied her friend, always stayed

as late as she.

"I'd pick those two for running-mates anywhere," Ralph said in private

to Honey. "I wish I had a dollar bill for every time I've met up with

that combination, one simple, devoted, self-sacrificing, the other

selfish, calculating, catty."

Clara was not exactly beautiful, although she had many points of beauty.

Her straight red hair clung to her head like a close-fitting helmet of

copper. Her skin balanced delicately between a brown pallor and a golden

sallowness. Her long, black lashes paled her gray eyes slightly; her

snub nose made charming havoc of what, without it, would have been a

conventional regularity of profile. She was really no more slender than

the normal woman, but, compared with her mates, she seemed of elfin

slimness; she was shapely in a supple, long-limbed way. There was

something a little exotic about her. Her green and gold plumage gave her

a touch of the fantastic and the bizarre. Prevailingly, she arrayed

herself in flowers that ran all the shades from cream and lemon to

yellow and orange. She was like a parrot among more uniformly feathered

birds.