Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

And all the time, Babe says, shy little Jessica is having the worst kind of a case with one of the Military Academy cadets, who started up an acquaintance with her one day on the street-car, behind the chaperone's back. She's slipped off and gone alone to movies several times to meet him, when she was supposed to be taking tea with her aunt. Yet she looks up in such an innocent, wide-eyed way, and seems so shocked when such escapades are mentioned, that you wouldn't suspect her any more than you would a little gray kitten. But it's making her dreadfully deceitful.

Babe came up to our room to talk to Lillian and me about it, for she's really worried over those clandestine meetings. She says the whole trouble is that Jess doesn't know boys as they exist in the flesh. She knows only the demi-gods created by her own imagination. She has been brought up on fairy-tales in which princes often go around disguised as swine-herds, and, not having any brothers which would give her the key to the whole species, she doesn't know a swineherd when she meets him.

Babe told her no real prince would ask anything clandestine, and that this cadet she's mooning around about is only an overgrown schoolboy with a weak chin and a bad complexion, and if she could see him as he really is and as he looks to the rest of us girls, it would cure her of her romantic infatuation. And Babe told her, moreover, that no real prince would pretend to be a poet when he wasn't, and that the verses he sent her were not original as she fondly believed, wearing them around inside her middy blouse. Babe couldn't remember just what poem they were taken from, but said they were as well known to the public as "Casey at the bat." She is so blunt that when she begins handing out plain truths she never stops for anyone's feelings.

Babe says that if she ever marries and is left a widow in poor circumstances, she will support herself by starting a Correspondence School in a branch that will do more good than all the curriculums of all the colleges. It will be a sort of Geography of Life, teaching maps and boundaries of the "United States" and general information to fit one for entering it. She said we shouldn't be left to stumble into it, in blindfold ignorance like Jessica's.

Right there I couldn't resist breaking in to say, "Oh, speaking of a correspondence course, Babe, did you ever find that brass-balled bedstead you were looking for at the auction?"

Of course the question had no significance for Lillian, but it pointedly reminded Babe of the correspondence she had with the One for whom she was once all eyes when he was present, and all memory when he was gone. She's entirely over that foolishness now, but she turned as red as fire, just the same, and to keep Lillian from noticing, she turned to the bureau and began talking about the first thing she looked at.

It happened to be a photograph of Lillian's brother, Duffield, who is an upper classman at Annapolis. Lillian is awfully proud of him, although from his picture you wouldn't call him anything extraordinary. His nose is sort of snub, but he has a nice face as if he really might be the jolly kind of a big brother that Lillian says he is. She's always quoting him. I've heard so much about what "Duff thinks" and "Duff used to say and do" that I feel that I know him as well as if we'd been brought up in the same house.

So when she began singing his praises again, declaring that Duffield wouldn't ask a girl to meet him clandestinely and he wouldn't have any respect for one who wanted to, I withdrew from the conversation. It was time for me to go on copying the theme which Babe's entrance had interrupted.

She must have been responsive enough to have pleased even Lillian, for when next I was conscious of what they were saying, Lillian was including Babe in the invitation she had given me some time ago, to go along with them next time her mother motored down to Annapolis to see Duff. They're going down to a hop in April, which is only a few days off now, and again in June week, and stay at John Carrol Hall. Mrs. Locke has already written to Barby, inviting me, and Barby has given her permission.

Mrs. Locke is from Kentucky, and knows all the Shirleys. She always introduces me as "the granddaughter of our illustrious editor, you know." In that way I've met a lot of Barby's old friends when I've been invited to take dinner at the hotel with Lillian. That accounts also for my being included in their invitation to an informal musicale at the White House where I met the President and his wife. (See Book of Chronicles for six pages describing that grand occasion.)