Georgina's Service Stars

by Annie F. Johnston

I couldn't help smiling to myself when I looked back on the time when I had once imagined Watson to be the most congenial man I ever met. I was heartily glad that our acquaintance had been interrupted at that point, until I grew older and wiser. Suppose I had gone on looking at him through the prism of my ideals until I actually believed that the halo which my imagination put around him was a real one! What a little fool a girl of fifteen can be! It seems to me I have aged more in this last year at school, than in all the years that went before it put together. Only a few more days until I can count myself actually grown up—till I have reached that magic milestone, my eighteenth birthday!

Growing up is like the dawning of Spring. For a long time there are just a few twitters, a hint of buds in the hedgerows. Then, suddenly as an April shower, a mist of green drops down over the bare branches like a delicate veil, and one awakens to a world of bloom and birdsong and romance.

(That's a good paragraph to start a story with. I'll put an asterisk on the margin to mark it.)

I had expected to awaken to my Springtime and romance this very summer—to find it perhaps, in Kentucky. Barby and I have planned for years that my eighteenth birthday should be spent there. The very word, Kentucky, suggests romance to me. But now that the war has upset everyone's plans, I'll have to give it up. And Romance is not likely to come riding by to such a gray old fishing port as Provincetown.

This is what I told myself as we went along between the cranberry bogs and the dunes. But suddenly we made a turn that showed us the entire end of the Cape. There, with the sunset light upon it, was the town, curving around the harbor like a golden dream city, rising above a "sea of glass mingled with fire." Spires and towers and chimney tops, with the great shaft of the Pilgrims high above them all, stood transfigured in that wonderful shining. I took it as an omen—a good omen of all sorts of delightful and unexpected happenings that might come to me.

When we reached the station, I had two completely separate and distinct impulses, which made me afraid that I still lack considerable of being grown up. The first fishy smell of the harbor which greeted me, with its tang of brine and tar, gave me the impulse to send my suitcase up to the house by the baggage man, and run all the way home. I wanted to go skipping along the streets as I used to when my skirts were knee high and my curls bobbing over my shoulders. I wanted to speak to everyone I met and have everyone call back at me, "Hello, Georgina," in friendly village fashion. I wanted to smell what was cooking for supper in every house I passed, and maybe if the baker's cart came along with its inviting step in the rear, "hang on behind" for a block or two.

The second impulse was to powder my nose a trifle, put on a little face veil and a pair of perfectly fitting gloves, and then when the panel mirror between the car windows showed a modish and tailor-made young lady, correct in every detail, step into the bus and drive home to make an impression on Tippy.

The latter impulse dominated, and I am glad it did, for Judith and George Woodson and several others of the old crowd were at the station to meet us. Babe hadn't even set her hat straight, but she didn't know it. Neither did Watson. They just went along, smiling vacuously (I guess that's as good a word as any, though I'm not exactly sure of it) on everything and everybody.

It seemed so strange to come home to a house with no Barby in it, but it was such a satisfaction to feel that my arrival put Tippy into her little company flutter. It was the face veil which did it, I am sure, and the urban air which I acquired in Washington. I am taller than she, now, and I had to stoop a little to kiss her. Instead of her saying, as I expected, for me to run along and take my things off, because supper was getting cold, she led the way upstairs to my room, just as if I'd been the visiting missionary's wife, or relatives from out of the state. And she went around setting things straighter, which were already straight, and asking if there was anything I'd have to make me comfortable, till I hardly knew myself, her making such company out of me.