Florence became thoughtful. "I never did see as many bugs before, all
together this way," she said. "What you goin' to do with 'em, Herbert?"
"I'm makin' my expairaments."
But her thoughtfulness increased. "It seems to me," she said
slowly:--"Herbert, it seems to me there must be some awful inter'sting
thing we could do with so many bugs all together like this."
"'We'!" he cried. "My goodness, whose insecks do you think these insecks
are?"
"I just know there's somep'n," she went on, following her own line of
thought, and indifferent to his outburst. "There's somep'n we could do
with 'em that we'd never forget, if we could only think of it."
In spite of himself, Herbert was interested. "Well, what?" he asked.
"What could we do with 'em we'd never forget?"
In her eyes there was a far-away light as of a seeress groping. "I don't
just know exackly, but I know there's _somep'n_--if we could only think
of it--if we could just----" And her voice became inaudible, as in
dreamy concentration she seated herself upon the discarded ice-cream
freezer, and rested her elbows upon her knees and her chin upon the
palms of her hands.
In silence then, she thought and thought. Herbert also was silent, for
he, too, was trying to think, not knowing that already he had proved
himself to be wax in her hands, and that he was destined further to show
himself thus malleable. Like many and many another of his sex, he never
for an instant suspected that he spent the greater part of his time
carrying out ideas implanted within him by a lady-friend. Florence was
ever the imaginative one of those two, a maiden of unexpected fancies
and inexplicable conceptions, a mind of quicksilver and mist. There was
within her the seedling of a creative artist, and as she sat there, on
the ice-cream freezer in Herbert's cellar, with the slowly growing
roseate glow of deep preoccupation upon her, she looked strangely sweet
and good, and even almost pretty.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Do you s'pose," she said, at last, in a musing voice: "Herbert, do you
s'pose maybe there's some poor family's children somewheres that haven't
got any playthings or anything and we could take all these----"
But here Herbert proved unsympathetic. "I'm not goin' to give my insecks
to any poor people's children," he said emphatically. "I don't care how
poor they are!"
"Well, I thought maybe just as a surprise----"
"I won't do it. I had mighty hard work to catch thi
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