ime," 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.

Julia made no comment.

It was Chiquita who took it up.

"My husband talks enough. In fact, he talks all the time. But if I tire
of his voice, I let myself fall aslee