Angel Island

They won't be home until very late tonight," announced Lulu. "The work

they're doing now is hard and irritating and fussy. Honey says that they

want to get through with it as soon as possible. He said they'd keep at

it as long as the light lasted."

"It seems as if their working days grew longer all the time," Clara said

petulantly. "They start off earlier and earlier in the morning and they

stay later and later at night. And did you know that they are planning

soon to stay a week at the New Camp - they say the walk back is so

fatiguing after a long day's work."

The others nodded.

"And then the instant they've had their dinner," Lulu continued, "off

they go to that tiresome Clubhouse - for tennis and ball and bocci. It

seems, somehow, as if I never had a chance to talk with Honey nowadays.

I should think they'd get enough of each other, working side by side all

day long, the way they do. But no! The moment they've eaten and had

their smoke, they must get together again. Why is it, I wonder? I should

think they would have said all they had to say in the daytime."

"Pete is worse than any of them," Clara went on. "After he comes back

from the Clubhouse, he wants to sit up and write for an hour or two. Oh,

I get fairly desperate sometimes, sitting there listening to the eternal

scratching of his pen. I cannot understand his point of view, to save my

life. If I talk, it irritates him. My very breathing annoys him; he

cannot have me in the same room with him. But if I leave the cabin, he

can't write a word. He wants me near, always. He says it's the knowing

I'm there that makes him feel like writing. And then Sundays, if he

isn't writing, he's painting. I don't mind his not being there in the

daytime in a way because, of course, there's always Peterkin. But at

night, when I've put Peterkin to bed I do want something different to

happen. As it is, I have to make a scene to get up any excitement. I do

it, too, without compunction. When it gets to the point that I know I

must scream or go crazy, I scream. And I do a good job in screaming,

too."

"What would you like him to do, Clara?" Julia asked.

The petulant frown between Clara's eyebrows deepened. "I don't know,"

she said wearily. "I don't know what it is that I want to do; but I want

to do something. Peterkin is asleep and perfectly safe - and I feel like

going somewhere. Now, if I could fly, it would rest me so, to go for a

long, long journey through the air." As she concluded, some new

expression, some strange hardness of her maturity, melted; her face was

for an instant the face of the old Clara.