“Oh!” The young man’s grin was frank, honest and friendly. “Well, this is my first trip in these big birds. I’ve got a little ship all my own, only just now she’s busted up quite a bit.”
“Cracked up? Too bad!” Rosemary was truly sorry. She was going to like this passenger. Besides, to one who sails the air a crack-up is just as true an occasion for sorrow as a shipwreck is to a mariner on the high seas. “What happened?” she asked quietly. “Bad storm?”
“No.” He laughed lightly. “Couple of struts got loose. I nearly lost control two thousand feet up. Cracked up in a corn field. Shucked a lot of corn.” He laughed rather loudly.
Rosemary’s face was sober. She had seen his kind before. They went in for flying because it promised thrills. They neglected their planes. If they crashed and were not killed, they turned it into a joke. The whole thing made her feel sick inside. She loved flying. She thought of it as one of God’s latest and most marvelous gifts to man. She knew too that nothing very short of perfection in care, equipment and piloting could put it in the place in every man’s life where it belonged.
“So you laugh at a crash that results from carelessness?” Her lips were white. “That’s the sort of thing that makes life hard for all of us who are trying to make flying seem a safe and wonderful thing. Nothing but selfishness could make one laugh at a tragedy or a near tragedy that is his own fault. It—”
But she stopped herself. After all, she was a stewardess, being paid to be pleasant.
Springing to her feet, she moved up the aisle to see that the airplane load of traveling salesmen forward had the papers, pencils, magazines and pillows they needed.
“So you’re a sample,” said the youth as she returned to her seat. “Don’t know as I want a full bottle after all.”
“In the end you’ll take it.” She was smiling now. “Or someone will be setting up a marble marker where little Willie lies. And that,” she added slowly, “would be too bad.”
She spoke, not of herself, but her attitude toward aviation. He knew this. She could read it in his eyes.