“And what about lobsters?” asked Crullers. “I like lobster all cooked up in cream the way Polly makes it in the chafing dish. How can we catch them?”
“Here you are, Crullers,” called Ruth, from the other end of the cabin. “You sit down here, and read all about it. I have just finished, and I feel as though I could set any lobster pot along the coast, now.”
That evening was the last they were to spend on the yacht. It was Monday night, and the captain promised that if all went well they should waken in harbor the following morning. So after dinner they gathered in the cabin, and Mrs. Yates played for them on the piano, while out in the moonlight the Admiral paced the deck with the Senator, and put his head inside the door every now and then to suggest some favorite.
“Isn’t it queer, Polly?” Isabel said softly, as she watched them, the Senator in his white flannels and Mrs. Yates all in white too, with her soft, fair hair worn in a single coronet braid about her head. “Isn’t it queer that the nicest people are always the simplest in their ways, and the most unaffected. It’s only the others—”
“The nobodies,” assented Polly, quickly, nodding her head. “I know just what you mean. They act as if they had swallowed a pound of starch. Grandfather told me that Mrs. Yates was the only daughter of the old Arnold family, in Washington. He said he remembered walking one day along the street, and meeting three colored nurses in a solemn procession. There was one to carry a parasol over the oldest one, and another to carry the baby’s wraps, and finally the baby herself in the arms of the chief mammy. Just think of it. And that was Mrs. Yates when she was Peggie Arnold.”
“Mrs. Yates,” came the Admiral’s round tones from the doorway, “do you happen to know ‘Billy was a Bo’sun’?”
In answer Mrs. Yates’s fingers ran off a little prelude, and she sang, while all the girls clustered around the piano to listen to the brand new song:
“Oh, Billy was a bo’sun, bold and brave,
William was a gay young sailor,
Sailed upon the south sea wave.