Dorothy and Bess made the trip across the bay in the Nixie, to call on the invalid, and lend their share to the social side of the afternoon. Crullers had never been the guest of honor anywhere before, but she was that day, as she sat up on the couch in the living-room, with Polly’s long pink kimono around her, and pink wild roses fastened on each side her braids, above her ears, in Japanese fashion.
The glee club played all the sea songs they could remember, and all hands piped up merrily from “Nancy Lee” to “Anchored.” Then Polly announced that the best part of the program was yet to come. Each of the girls would render her favorite poem about the sea, and Crullers had to start the ball rolling.
“I only know the one about the ‘Schooner Hesperus,’ Polly,” she said, shyly, “and I like it best of all.”
“Say it, then,” Polly told her. “We like it, too.”
Then Kate recited “The Three Fishers,” her slow, contralto tones and rather dreamy air well fitting themselves to the sad old verses. Isabel gave “Annabel Lee” most touchingly, and Polly ordered a quick song in happier vein to offset the sadness of the two. So after a rousing “Billy was a Bo’sun,” Ted got up, and declaimed the only poem on the sea she knew, one she had had to memorize at Calvert Hall as a punishment for putting the house cat into Fraulein’s shirtwaist box, and scaring her nearly into a fainting fit (Fraulein, not the cat).
“The mountains look on Marathon,
And Marathon looks on the sea,
And sitting there a while alone,
I dreamed that Greece might yet be free.”
Polly always liked to watch Ted’s face when she came to that verse. She would lift her chin, and her gray eyes would flash, and her fists clench. At Calvert Hall Ted had always been the most successful “declaimer,” as Miss Calvert termed it, and she “fixed Greece good and plenty” this time; so Sue said when it was over.