“She’s a dear, and it’s a pity you hadn’t a small portion of her common sense,” championed Aileen emphatically.
“I have sense enough to be engaged before I’m seventeen, and to know what it means to be embraced, which is more than any other girl in this school can boast,” brindled Petty.
“Well, I should hope it is!” was Aileen’s disgusted retort. “And if you don’t watch out you’ll boast just once too often and Miss Woodhull will get wise to your boasting. Then there will be something stirring unless I’m mighty mistaken.”
“Pouf! Who cares for Miss Woodhull? I don’t believe she ever had a proposal in all her life.”
“Well, you’d better be careful,” was Aileen’s final warning as she left the half-dozen girls of which Petty formed the bright particular star.
“Those three feel themselves so superior yet they are such children,” was Petty’s withering remark.
Aileen was two months her junior. Sally less than a year and Beverly exactly fifteen months. But being engaged very naturally developes and broadens one’s views of life. Dear “Reggie” was just twenty, and had his lady love but known that interesting fact, had already been “engaged” to three other susceptible damsels during his brief sojourn upon the earth. Moreover, he was openly boasting of it to his fellow midshipmen and regarding it as a good joke. Oh, Reggie was a full-fledged, brass-buttoned heart-breaker. Happily he was not a representative among his companions. Most of them are gentlemen. They can do a good bit of “fussing” as they term it, but this wholesale engagement business is the exception, rather than the rule.
Nevertheless, Petty had sang of the charms of Annapolis until all her set were wild to go there, and her enthusiasm had spread like chickenpox. If the affairs at Annapolis were all Petty pictured them and the midshipmen as fascinating, the place must, indeed, be a sort of Paradise.
Of course, all the girls knew that Beverly was a real, true Admiral’s grandniece. That he had left Annapolis upon his graduation to take sides with his native state. So why had Beverly never been to that alluring place?
Beverly had never given Annapolis a thought. Now, however, she meant to know a few facts regarding it, and while home on her vacation learned a number. She also learned that sometime in the spring, during the Easter holiday, possibly, her uncle might take her and the boys to Washington and while stopping in the capital, visit the old town which lay adjacent to the Naval Academy Reservation.