Joey gulped, and nodded.
“I know some Pells at Tuxedo Park,” she said. “Are you one of them?”
“No’m,” said Joey.
“Shall we dance?”
He was too overwhelmed by this entirely novel experience to refuse. She towed and hauled and steered him about the crowded room, while the phonograph did its best with “Over There.”
“I think,” she said, “it’s just wonderful of you boys to do what you are doing.” Joey flushed. “I wish,” she said wistfully, “that I were a man. I’d be in the cavalry. Don’t you just adore horses, Mr. Pell?”
Joey licked dry lips and nodded. He hated horses, as a matter of fact; but she had called him Mister, and that was another new and stimulating experience.
Other girls danced with Joey Pell that day. They told him, every one of them, how brave a thing he was doing. He drank a great deal of not very sweet lemonade, and only when the Home Trench closed for the day, at six o’clock, did he leave.
He was almost as much intoxicated as if the lemonade had been champagne, as he strode up the avenue, chin out, eyes narrowed sternly.
He wished earnestly that he might meet one of the enemy face to face at that moment. He felt capable of laying him low, barehanded. He saluted all officers with a sharp precise salute; he even saluted a passing letter carrier. His heart beat with unwonted vigor; he was a soldier; a somebody.