Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

I know now what Barby meant by trance. It is the same thing as being "all memory when one is gone." Yesterday Babe Nolan and I were walking along the street together, she eating an apple, when Richard drove by without seeing us. It was up along in one of the narrowest turns, where he had to pass so close to the board walk that the machine nearly grazed it. Yet he went by, perfectly unconscious of us. Never looked to the right nor the left, and never even heard when I called to him. Usually he is on the look-out to wave his hand to anybody he knows. When he had gone by Babe said:

"That boy doesn't know whether he's in the body or out of the body. Somebody ought to tell him about Esther Gilfred. It's a shame to let him go on that way making a goose of himself."

"Tell him what about her?" I demanded.

"Oh, that it's all a bluff about her brushing up her French. She doesn't know enough French to brush. All she does is to hold the dictionary while he reads. She can't even find the words by herself half the time. Besides she's years older than he is, although she passes for the same age. And worse yet—she's engaged."

I was so furious that I contradicted her hotly, but she just looked at me over the apple she was biting into, with the calm, unruffled gaze of an old Aztec. Babe can be the most provoking person at times that ever lived. She prides herself on having a mathematical mind, and being exact about facts and figures. The worst of it is she usually is, and will go any length to prove she's right. Although I know in this case she must be mistaken, it worries me in spite of myself.

She said that one day at the Gilfreds' they were laughing over some old photographs of Esther and Judith, taken when they were babies. On the back of one was written: "This is our little Esther at the age of six months and six days." It was signed with her father's name and the date. Esther snatched it away and tore it up before anyone else saw it, but, Babe says, counting up from that date to this, Esther is all of three years older than Richard. She is twenty and a half.

And she said that twice while she and Viola were visiting in Yarmouth, their Aunt Rachel took them to a hop in Barnstable. Both times Esther, who was visiting in Barnstable then, was there with the man she's engaged to. He's a doctor. They met at a house-party when he was a medical student at Harvard and she was at a finishing school near Boston. Her aunt told Babe's aunt all about it. They've been engaged nearly a year, but Esther won't have it announced because she says it would spoil her good times wherever she goes. She'd never make any more conquests. He's so busy establishing his practice that he can't pay her the attention and give her the things that the other men do.

When Babe told me that I felt as if the solid ground were giving away under my feet. She seemed perfectly sure that what she was telling was the straight, unvarnished truth. And yet, I cannot, I will not believe that Esther would stoop to deceit in the smallest matter. She is the soul of honor. She couldn't be sacredly betrothed to one man and then go on acting exactly as if she wasn't, with another. Besides, I heard her say one day that she is just Judith's age, which is seventeen, and another time that she was "heart whole and fancy free."

When I triumphantly quoted that last to Babe to prove she was wrong she swallowed another bite of apple and then said, "Well, a coquette might be all that and at the same time engaged. And she is engaged, and I can prove it."

All I could trust myself to say was, "Babe Nolan, your remarks are perfectly insulting. I'll thank you to remember you're talking about my very best friend and the very finest and sweetest girl I've ever known in my whole life."