“She certainly is one peach of a female,” said Ralph Addington.  I don’t know but what she’s prettier than my blonde.  Too bad she’s stuck on that stiff of a Merrill.  I suppose he’d sit there every afternoon for a year and just look at her.”

“I should think she came from Andalusia,” Honey answered, watching the long, low sweep of her scarlet flight.  “She’s got to have a Spanish name.  Say we call her Chiquita.”

And Chiquita she became.

Chiquita was beautiful.  Her beauty had a highwayman quality of violence; it struck quick and full in the face.  She was the darkest of all the girls, a raven black.  As Lulu was all coppery shine and shimmer, all satiny gloss and gleam, so Chiquita was all dusk in the coloring, all velvet in the surfaces.  Her great heavy-lidded eyes were dusk and velvet, with depth on depth of an unmeaning dreaminess.  Her hair, brows, lashes were dusk and velvet; and there was no light in them.  Her skin, a dusky cream on which velvety shade accented velvety shadow, was colorless except where her lips, cupped like a flower, offered a splash of crimson.  Yet, in spite of the violence of her beauty, her expression held a tropical languor.  Indeed, had not her flying compelled a superficial vigor from her, she would have seemed voluptuous.

Chiquita wore scarlet always, the exact scarlet of her wings, a clinging mass of tropical bloom; huge star-shaped or lilly-like flowers whose brilliant lustre accentuated her dusky coloring.

They had no sooner accustomed themselves to the incongruity of Frank Merrill’s conquest of this big, gorgeous creature than Pete Murphy developed what Honey called “a case.”  It was scarcely a question of development; for with Pete it had been the “thin one” from the beginning.  Following an inexplicable masculine vagary, he christened her Clara — and Clara she ultimately became.  Among themselves, the men employed other names for her; with them she was not so popular as with Pete.  To Ralph she was “the cat”; to Billy, “the poser”; to Honey, “Carrots.”

Clara appeared first with Lulu.  She did not stay long on her initial visit.  But afterwards she always accompanied her friend, always stayed as late as she.

“I’d pick those two for running-mates anywhere,” Ralph said in private to Honey.  “I wish I had a dollar bill for every time I’ve met up with that combination, one simple, devoted, self-sacrificing, the other selfish, calculating, catty.”

Clara was not exactly beautiful, although she had many points of beauty.  Her straight red hair clung to her head like a close-fitting helmet of copper.  Her skin balanced delicately between a brown pallor and a golden sallowness.  Her long, black lashes paled her gray eyes slightly; her snub nose made charming havoc of what, without it, would have been a conventional regularity of profile.  She was really no more slender than the normal woman, but, compared with her mates, she seemed of elfin slimness; she was shapely in a supple, long-limbed way.  There was something a little exotic about her.  Her green and gold plumage gave her a touch of the fantastic and the bizarre.  Prevailingly, she arrayed herself in flowers that ran all the shades from cream and lemon to yellow and orange.  She was like a parrot among more uniformly feathered birds.