“Well, I’ll be — " said Billy.  “After they saved your life!  Honey, I guess I don’t know you any more.”

“What’s changed you?” Pete asked in amazement.

“Can’t tell you why — don’t know myself why when you get the answer tell me.  Only in the ten minutes that those girls packed me through the air, I did some quick thinking, I can’t explain to you why we’ve got the right to capture them.  But we have.  That’s all there is to it.”

War broke out with a new animosity; for they had, of course, now definitely divided into sides.  Their conversation always turned into argument now, no matter how peaceably and innocently it began.

The girls had begun to visit the island again, singly now, singly always.  Discussion died down temporarily and the wordless tete-a-teteing began again.  Lulu hovered ever at Honey’s shoulder.  Clara postured always within Pete’s vision.  Chiquita took up her eternal vigil on Frank’s reef.  Peachy discovered new wonders of what Honey called “trick flying.”  Julia became a fixed white star in their blue noon sky.

A day or two or three of this long-distance wooing, and argument exploded more vehemently than ever.  Honey and Ralph still maintained that, as the ruling sex of a man-managed world, they had the right of discovery to these women.  Frank still maintained that, as a supra-human race, the flying-girls were subject to supra-human laws.  Billy and Pete still maintained that, as the development not only of the race but of the individual depended on the treatment of the female by the male, the capture of these independent beings at this stage of civilization would be a return to barbarism.

After one night of wrangling, they came to the agreement that no one of them would take steps towards capture until all five had consented to it.  They drew up a paper to this effect and signed it.

Their cabins were nearly completed now.  Boundless leisure threatened to open before them.  More and more in the time which they were alone they fell into the habits which their individual tastes developed.  Frank still worked on his library.  He had transferred the desk and the bookcases to the interior of his hut.  He spent all his spare time there arranging, classifying, and cataloguing his books.  Billy fell into an orgy of furniture-making and repairing.  Addington began, unaided, to build a huge cabin, bigger than the others, and separated a little distance from them.  Nobody asked him what it was for.  Honey took long solitary walks into the interior of the island.  He returned with great bunches of uprooted flowers which he planted against the cabin-walls.  Pete dragged out from an unexplored trunk a box of water-colors, a block of paper.  Now, when he was not working on a symphonic poem, he was coping with the wonders of the semi-tropical coloring.  His companions rallied and harried him, especially about the poem; but he could always silence them with a threat to read it aloud.  All the Celt in him had come to the surface.  They heard him chanting his numbers in the depths of the forest; sometimes he intoned them, swinging on the branch of a high tree.  He even wandered over the reefs, reciting them to the waves.