Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

I was still debating the question in my mind when we drove into "little old Crabtown" as Mrs. Waldon calls Annapolis. She asked the chauffeur to drive by the house where she used to live, so she could point out the place where the midshipmen used to swarm in for their favorite "eats" whenever they could get away from the Academy, and where she and her girls and their guests had those funny "guinea-hen teas" that she'd been telling us about.

While we were drawn up by the curb in front of the house, a big, blond boy in midshipman uniform, swinging past at a lively gait, stopped and saluted, the surprise on his face spreading into a vast grin as he recognized Mrs. Waldon. The next instant he was on the running board, shaking hands with her, and they began talking a dialect none of us could understand, about "dragging" and "queens" and "Jimmy-legs." The regular Midshipman "lingo" she explained afterward when she had introduced him to us in ordinary English. He was Mac Gordon, a sort of a cousin of hers from out West.

The conversation that we couldn't understand was nothing but that she was asking him if he intended taking a girl to the dance, and telling him that we would be there, and asking if the same old guards were at the gates, because she intended to take us over the Academy grounds next day and hoped someone she knew would be detailed to escort us. I could see right then and there that Mac was making up his mind to give Lillian a good time, from the way he kept looking at her, sort of bashfully, through his eyelashes.

Well, I needn't have worried about anything. I had "crossed my bridge before I got to it," as Uncle Darcy often says, when I was fearing I'd be a wall flower. I had the first dance with Duffield, and the moment the band struck up I went into it, feeling as I did that night in the Spanish fandango. After that my card filled up so fast that I had to split dances. Mac Gordon was among the first, and Bailey Burrell, who once spent a summer in Provincetown, so long ago that I'd nearly forgotten him. But he remembered lots of things about me; the first time he ever saw me, for instance, dressed up at a bazaar as "A Little Maid of Long Ago." He even told how I was dressed, with a poke bonnet trimmed in rosebuds over my curls, sitting in a little rocking chair on a table. And he remembered about his sister Peggy breaking my prism. She's cured of her lameness now, and is grown up to be a very pretty girl, Bailey said. He promised to bring her picture around to the hotel next day.

He and Duffield were so entertaining, that as I talked and danced with them, suddenly Mr. Tucker and his opinions ceased to interest me any more. When he came hurrying up to speak to me and to ask for a dance, it was the strangest thing—his personality seemed to have changed since last summer. I looked up to him then as being quite intellectual and fascinating, but, seeing him now with Duffield and Bailey and Bob Mayfield, he seemed really rather insignificant. They called him "Watty," and that expresses him exactly.

But Babe seemed to find him very entertaining, and they danced together a lot. Good old Babe, so homely and so plain. Her nose was shiney and her hair straggling and her dress all sagging crooked before she'd been at it an hour. But she was having a beautiful time, and there's not a bit of jealousy in her nature. She came up to me once to ask for a pin and whispered, "Georgina, you're perfectly wonderful tonight—all sparkle and glow."

It made me very happy, for Babe's compliments are few and far between. She is more apt to speak of your bad points than your good ones, and to be moved to say anything like that meant a lot from her. When I took her over to Mrs. Waldon to get some pins out of her "chaperone bag," because I didn't have any and she needed nearly a dozen, I heard Mrs. Waldon and Mrs. Locke saying nice things about me in an undertone, that made me think of that little line in "The Battle of Waterloo," about "cheeks that blushed with praise of their own loveliness."

It seemed to me that if the band would only keep on playing I could float on and on forever to the music. Oh, it's so wonderful to be a-tingle to the very finger-tips with the joy of just being alive—radiantly alive! To have all eyes following you admiringly as if you were a flower swaying on its stem! Oh I know this sounds conceited, written out in black and white in plain daylight, but that night as they played the strains of "Poor Butterfly" again and again, I felt to the fullest the joy of being a social success, such as Esther was. I felt all wings and as if I really were—at least inwardly—"all sparkle and glow." I wished that the night need never, never end, and the music and the heavenly floating motion need never stop. I wonder if a time can ever come when I'll be so old and stiff and feeble like Aunt Elspeth, that the strains of "Poor Butterfly" will not give me wings again. How does one ever become reconciled to being old?

Next morning when we went over to the Naval Academy none of the boys could get off to accompany us, but the "Jimmy-legs" detailed to escort us was an old acquaintance of Mrs. Waldon's, and she has seen the sights so many times that she is as good as a guide-book. Nothing escaped us. I could have spent a week in the building where the trophy flags are, especially in the room that is lined with them, ceiling and all. By the time we had seen them, from Commodore Perry's "Don't give up the ship" down to the Chinese flag captured from the Boxers, we were worked up to such a pitch of patriotic pride that we wanted to go right off and do something ourselves to add a guidon or an ensign to that "long honor roll of heroic victories on the high seas."