But they were not so sweet or toothsome to our girlish tastes as the tawny-orange cloud-berries which Clare and I were eating as we lay. So busy was she with the luscious pile we had gathered that I had to wait for an answer. And then, "Speak for yourself," she said. "I'm sure you look like a short-coated baby. He is somewhere up the river, too." Munch, munch, munch!
"Who is, you impertinent, greedy little chit?"
"Oh, you know!" she answered. "Don't you wish you had your gray plush here, Bab?"
I flung a look of calm disdain at her; but whether it was the berry juice which stained our faces that took from its effect, or the free mountain air which papa says saps the foundations of despotism, that made her callous, at any rate she only laughed scornfully and got up and went off down the stream with her rod, leaving me to finish the cloud-berries, and stare lazily up at the snow-patches on the hillside--which somehow put me in mind of the gray plush--and follow or not, as I liked.
Clare has a wicked story of how I gave in to papa, and came to start without anything but those rough clothes. She says he said--and Jack Buchanan has told me that lawyers put no faith in anything that he says she says, or she says he says, which proves how much truth there is in this--that if Bab took none but her oldest clothes, and fished all day, and had no one to run upon her errands--he meant Jack and the others, I suppose--she might possibly grow an inch in Norway. Just as if I wanted to grow an inch? An inch indeed! I am five feet one and a half high, and papa, who puts me an inch shorter, is the worst measurer in the world. As for Miss Clare, she would give all her inches for my eyes. So there!
After Clare left it began to be dull and chilly. When I had pictured to myself how nice it would be to dress for dinner again, and chosen the frock I would wear upon the first evening, I grew tired of the snow-patches, and started up stream, stumbling and falling into holes, and clambering over rocks, and only careful to save my rod and my face. It was no occasion for the gray plush, but I had made up my mind to reach a pool which lay, I knew, a little above me; having filched a yellow-bodied fly from Clare's hat, with a view to that particular place.