You get kind of used here to see a woman do all the chores that we all considered a man’s job. Driving automobiles, or cleaning windows high up in the air, or delivering mails, or tending a street-car, or despatching trains. They have boys, quite little fellers, to help them with the trains. The woman does the work and the boy blows a whistle, like what you would expect of a boy. I seen a whole bunch of girls one day outside a factory, with their faces and hands stained yellow. That was picric acid: they make shells with it. It spoils their looks some, but they should worry. They just waved their hands and laughed at us when we tried to josh them. I reckon the girls at home are all doing that too now; but don’t you go for to stain yourself yellow, my dear.
But the Islanders are not too busy to make an attempt to entertain us. Some of these attempts are rather formidable. To boys like Second Lieutenant Sam Richards and his crony Jim Hollis, in whose pleasant little home town far west of the Alleghenies every one knows every one else, and young men and maidens usually exchange invitations over the telephone (which instrument is practically unknown in English rural districts), and that awful shibboleth of English society, the language of the third person, is happily extinct, it is a little alarming to find upon the bulletin-board in the Mess a stiff square of white pasteboard bearing the legend:
Col. Adams and Officers
LADY WYVERN-GRYPHON
AT HOME
SATURDAY, JULY 6th, 3:30 P.M.-7:00
AT
BROADOAK PARK
LAWN TENNIS R.S.V.P.
Jim Hollis scrutinized this document whimsically. Then he turned to his companion.