The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit | Page 5

I'm doing to help it. Boys seventeen years old can enlist, even
sixteen-year-old ones, and go right to the front, but a girl sixteen years
old isn't any better off than if she were sixteen months. I'm nearly
nineteen, and I wanted to go as a stenographer, but they wouldn't
consider me for a minute. Said I was too young." Sahwah threw out her
hands in a tragic gesture and her brow darkened.
"It's a shame," Hinpoha agreed sympathetically. "In books young girls
have no end of adventures in war time, girls no older than we; they

catch spies and outwit the enemy and save their lovers' lives and carry
important messages, but nothing like that will ever happen to us. All
we'll ever do is just stay at home peacefully and knit."
Hinpoha gave an impatient jerk and the knitting fell into her lap with a
protesting tinkle of needles, while the stitch which she was in the act of
transferring slipped off and darted merrily away on an excursion up the
length of the sock. Hinpoha threw up her hands in exasperation.
"That's the third time that's happened in an hour!" she exclaimed in a
vexed tone. "I hope the soldiers appreciate how much trouble it is to
keep their feet covered. I'd rather fight any day than knit," she finished
emphatically.
"Here, let me pick up the dropped stitches for you," said Migwan
soothingly, reaching over for the tangled mess of yarn. "You're getting
all tired and hot," she continued, skilfully pursuing the agile and elusive
dropped stitches down the grey woolen wake of the sock and bringing
them triumphantly up to resume their place in the sun.
"It takes me an age to get a pair of socks done for the Red Cross,"
Hinpoha grumbled on, "and they're as cross as two sticks if you drop a
single stitch! That woman down at headquarters made the biggest fuss
about the last pair I brought in, just because I'd slipped a stitch in the
wrong place--it hardly showed a bit--and because one sock was an inch
longer than the other. War isn't a bit like I thought it would be," she
sighed plaintively, with a vengeful poke at the knitting, which Migwan
had just restored to her.
Poor romantic Hinpoha, trying to sail her ship of rosy fancies on a sea
of stern reality, and finding it pretty hard sailing! Leaning back against
the green plush of the train seat, which set off like an artist's
background the burnished glory of her red curls, and dreaming
regretfully of the vanished days when chivalry rode on fiery steeds and
ladies fair led much more eventful lives than their emancipated
great-granddaughters, it never occurred to her--nor to the rest of the
Winnebagos either, for that matter--that romance might have become
up to date along with science and the fashions, and that in these modern

days of speed and efficiency High Adventure might purchase a ticket at
the station window and go faring forth in a Pullman car. So Hinpoha
dreamed dreams of the way she would like things to happen and built
airy castles around the Winnebagos as heroines; but little did she
suspect that another architect was also at work on those same castles,
an architect whose lines are drawn with an indelible pencil, and whose
finished work no man may reject.
Hinpoha did not resume her knitting again. She opened her hand bag
and drew forth her mirror, and propping it up against her knee,
proceeded to arrange the curls that had escaped from their imprisoning
pins and were riding around her ears. Then she put the mirror back and
drew out a bottle of hand lotion and examined the stopper. She slipped
it in and out several times and then idly dropped a few violet petals
from the bunch at her belt into the bottle, shaking it about to make them
whirl, and then holding it still to watch them settle.
"It looks as though you were telling fortunes," remarked Sahwah,
watching the petals alternately whirl and sink, "like tea leaves, you
know."
Hinpoha brightened at once and animation came back into her face.
Better than anything else under the sun, Hinpoha loved to tell fortunes.
"Do you want me to tell yours, Sahwah?" she asked eagerly.
Sahwah agreed amiably; she did not care two straws about
fortune-telling herself, but she knew Hinpoha's hobby and willingly
submitted to countless "readings" of her future, in various ways, by the
ardent amateur seeress.
Hinpoha shook the bottle energetically, and then watched intently as
the petals gradually ceased whirling and came to rest at the bottom of
the bottle.
"There is a stranger coming into your life," she began impressively,
"awfully thin, and light."

"Like the syrup we had on our pancakes