Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

With everybody free to root through her bureau drawers, and with no locks in the house that work, of course she has absolutely no privacy, and she had several letters that she wouldn't have the family read for worlds. They were too sacred, and she couldn't bear to destroy them, for they breathed devotion in every line, and were her first of the kind. She thought of burying them under the garden hedge, but that would have necessitated digging them up every time she wanted to re-read them, and there was danger of the puppy trailing her and unearthing them if she went too often to that hallowed spot.

One night just before she and Viola went to Yarmouth for a visit, she found, quite by accident, that the brass balls on her bedposts were screwed on and were hollow. So she folded the letters up small and stuffed them into one, with a dried rose and a broken cuff-link that had associations, and screwed it back tight.

What was her horror when she came home two weeks later to find that her mother had had the room done over in their absence as a surprise for her and Viola. She had bought twin beds of bird's-eye maple and given one old bed to a Salvation Army man who was going through town collecting junk, and sent the other to a camp up in the White Mountains where her mother's people go every year. She didn't know which went where.

Now there's no telling how, when or where those letters will next see the light of day. It was bad enough to lose the letters, but Babe says she'll simply die if they fall into her Aunt Mattie's hands. She's the prim, cold kind who makes you feel that anything sentimental should never be mentioned. It's something to be ashamed of. Tippy's that kind.

I have written all this out not because it's important in itself, but because it's a link in a chain. If I hadn't happened to meet Babe and go with her to hunt for that bedstead, I wouldn't have been at the auction when my ideal girl came along, or when Richard drove by and I hailed him to borrow a quarter, and he stopped and saw her. What she said and what he said, and what happened afterward was like a game of "Consequences."

All sorts of stuff lay around on the grass—dishes and bed-slats and odd andirons. There was a beaded mat and a glass case of wax flowers, and a motto, "The Lord is my Shepherd," cross-stitched in pink and gray worsted, sitting right out on the grass. Babe said probably it was the work of hands long dead and gone, and didn't it seem sad that they should come to this end? But the tide was in and she'd have to go. She might have known she'd not find that bedstead. Would I walk up to the beach with her?

But I told her no, I'd just rummage around awhile longer to see what else there was for sale. Maybe I could get some "local color" that way. Babe knows about my writing. She is one of the girls I read my novel to, and she respects my talent. So she left me. I did get some local color by staying, and took out my pencil and pad, which I always carry around in my knitting bag, and made a note of it.

An old-fashioned hoop-skirt was thrown across a rose-bush, and a black silk bonnet lay under it, beside a pair of worn shoes. Both the bonnet and the shoes had what Tippy calls a "genteel" air, and made me think they must have belonged to a prim maiden lady with proud nose and slender feet, probably called "Miss Althea." The name came to me like an inspiration, I could almost see her standing by the rose-bush.

Just then some boys, who were wrestling around, bumping into everything, upset a barrel on the grass, and a great pile of framed photographs came rolling out. Some of them were comical enough for a Sunday supplement, women in tight basques and little saucer hats, and men with whiskers—beards or perfectly ridiculous bushy "burnsides." A crowd of summer people began making joking remarks about them to set each other to laughing.

But there was one in an oval walnut frame that I couldn't bear to have them make fun of, the photograph of a lady with a little boy leaning against her shoulder. She had a strong, kind face, with such steadfast eyes looking straight at you, that you just knew everybody went to her with their troubles. The boy was a dear little fellow, serious as a judge, with his hair brushed in a long roll on the top of his head in one of those old-fashioned coxcomb curls.