“Go as far as you like,” said Honey, dropping the stone into the pocket of his flannel shirt.  “Only if anybody really gets peeved about this junk of carbon, I’ll give it to him.”

For a while life flowed wonderful.  The men labored with a joy-in-work at which they themselves marveled.  Their out-of-doors existence showed its effects in a condition of glowing health.  Honey Smith changed first to a brilliant red, then to a uniform coffee brown, and last to a shining bronze which was the mixture of both these colors.  Pete Murphy grew one crop of freckles, then another and still another until Honey offered to “excavate” his features.  Ralph Addington developed a rich, subcutaneous, golden-umber glow which made him seem, in connection with an occasional unconventionality of costume, more than ever like the schoolgirl’s idea of an artist.  Billy Fairfax’s blond hair bleached to flaxen.  His complexion deepened in tone to a permanent pink.  This, in contrast with the deep clear blue of his eyes, gave him a kind of out-of-doors comeliness.  But Frank Merrill was the surprise of them all.  He not only grew handsomer, he grew younger; a magnificent, towering, copper-colored monolith of a man, whose gray eyes were as clear as mountain springs, whose white teeth turned his smile to a flash of light.  Constantly they patrolled the beach, pairs of them, studying the ocean for sight of a distant sail, selecting at intervals a new spot on which at night to start fires, or by day to erect signals.  They bubbled with spirits.  They laughed and talked without cessation.  The condition which Ralph Addington had deplored, the absence of women, made first for social relaxation, for psychological rest.

“Lord, I never noticed before — until I got this chance to get off and think of it — what a damned bother women are,” Honey Smith said one day.  “Of all the sexes that roam the earth, as George Ade says, I like them least.  What a mess they make of your time and your work, always requiring so much attention, always having to be waited on, always dropping things, always so much foolish fuss and ceremony, always asking such footless questions and never hearing you when you answer them.  Never really knowing anything or saying anything.  They’re a different kind of critter, that’s all there is to it; they’re amateurs at life.  They’re a failure as a sex and an outworn convention anyway.  Myself, I’m for sending them to the scrap-heap.  Votes for men!”

And with this, according to the divagations of their temperaments and characters, the others strenuously concurred.

Their days, crowded to the brim with work, passed so swiftly that they scarcely noticed their flight.  Their nights, filled with a sleep that was twin brother to Death, seemed not to exist at all.