And curiously enough, Julia answered in the exact words that Honey had used once.  “Anything’s fair in love or war — and this is both.  We can’t be fair.  We can’t trust them.  We trusted them once.  Once is enough for me.”

“But how, Julia?” Peachy asked.  Her voice had now a note of querulousness in it.  “How are we going to rebel?”

Julia started to speak.  Then she paused.  “There’s something I must ask you first.  Tell me, all of you, what did you do with your wings when the men cut them off?”

The rage faded out of the four faces.  A strange reticence seemed to blot out expression.  The reticence changed to reminiscence, to a deep sadness.

Lulu spoke first.  “I thought I was going to keep my wings as long as I lived.  I always thought of them as something wonderful, left over from a happier time.  I put them away, done up in silk.  And at first I used to look at them every day.  But I was always sad afterwards — and — and gradually, I stopped doing it.  Honey hates to come home and find me sad.  Months went by — I only looked at them occasionally.  And after a while, I did not look at them at all.  Then, one day, after Honey built the fireplace for me, I saw that we needed something — to — to — to sweep the hearth with.  I tried all kinds of things, but nothing was right.  Then, suddenly, I remembered my wings.  It had been two years since I’d looked at them.  And after that long time, I found that I didn’t care so much.  And so — and so — one day I got them out and cut them into little brooms for the hearth.  Honey never said anything about it — but I knew he knew.  Somehow — .”  A strange expression came into the face of the unanalytic Lulu.  “I always have a feeling that Honey enjoys using my wings about the hearth.”

Julia hesitated.  “What did you do, Chiquita?”

“Oh, I had all Lulu’s feeling at first, of course.  But it died as hers did.  You see this fan.  You have often commented on how well I’ve kept it all these years — I’ve mended it from month to month with feathers from my own wings.  The color is becoming to me — and Frank likes me to carry a fan.  He says that it makes him think of a country called Spain that he always wanted to visit when he was a youth.”

“And you, Clara?” Julia asked gently.

“Oh, I went through,” Clara replied, “just what Lulu and Chiquita did.  Then, one day, I said to myself, ’What’s the use of weeping over a, dead thing?’ I made my wings into wall-decorations.  You’re right about Honey, Lulu.”  For a moment there was a shade of conscious coquetry in Clara’s voice.  “I know that it gives Pete a feeling of satisfaction — I don’t exactly know why (unless it’s a sense of having conquered) — to see my wings tacked up on his bedroom walls.”