“Increased household activity,” Frank replied vaguely.  “And then mentally, I think she’s more vigorous.  She’s been reading a great deal by herself.  Formerly I found that reading annoyed her — even when I read aloud, explaining carefully as I went along.”

“I haven’t noticed an increased activity on Julia’s part,” Billy said thoughtfully.  “But she’s always been extraordinarily active, considering everything.  The way she gets about is marvelous.  But of course she’s planned the placing of her furniture with that in view.  She’s as quick as a cat.  I have noticed, however, that she seems much happier.  They certainly are a changed lot of women.”

“The twelve o’clock whistle has just blown,” Honey announced.  “Let’s eat.”

The five men dropped their tools.  They gathered their lunches together and fell to a voracious feeding.  At last, pipes appeared.  They stretched themselves to the smoker’s ease.  For a while, the silence was unbroken.  Then, here and there, somebody dropped an irrelevant remark.  Nobody answered it.

They lay in one corner of the big space which had been cleared from the jungle chaos.  On one side rippled the blue lake carving into many tiny bays and inlets and padded with great green oases of matted lily-leaves.  On the other side rose the highest hill on the island.  The cleared land stretched to the very summit of this hill.  Over it lay another chaos, the chaos of confusion; half-completed buildings of log and stone, rectangles and squares of dug-up land where buildings would some day stand, half-finished roadways, ditches of muddy water, hills of round beach-stones, piles of logs, some stripped of the bark, others still trailing a green huddle of leaf and branch, tools everywhere.  The jungle rolled like, a tidal wave to the very boundary; in places its green spume had fallen over the border.  As the men smoked, their eyes went back to the New Camp again and again.  It was obvious that constantly they made mental measurements, that ever in their mind’s eye they saw the completed thing.

“Well,” said Ralph, reverting without warning to the subject under discussion.  His manner tacitly assumed that the others had also been considering it mentally.  “I confess I don’t understand women really.  I’ve always thought that I did.  But I see now that I never have.”  Addington’s rare outbursts of frankness in regard to the other sex were the more startling because they contrasted so sharply with his normal attitude of lordly understanding and contempt.  “I’ve been a good manager and I’m not saying that I haven’t had my successes with them.  But as I look back upon them now, I realize I followed my intuitions, not my reason.  I’ve done what I’ve done without knowing why.  I have to feel my way still.  I can’t account for the change that’s come over them.  For four years now they’ve been at us to let their wings grow again.  And for four years we’ve been saying no in every possible tone of voice and with every possible inflection.  I’ve had no idea that Peachy would ever get over it.  My God, you fellows have no idea what I’ve been through with her in regard to this question of flying.  Why, one night three months ago, she had an awful attack of hysteria because I told her I’d have to cut Angela’s wings as soon as she was grown-up.”