But here was Florence. She had come to the airport with a definite purpose. She was, as you will recall, a playground director. She had tried her ability at many things, but this was her true vocation. Times were hard. Playgrounds had been closed. For the moment Florence was unemployed. But was she downhearted? Watch that smile, that jaunty tread. Florence was young. Tomorrow was around the corner and with it some opportunity for work. Just at this moment an unusual occupation had caught her fancy; she wished to become an airplane stewardess. How Jeanne would have laughed at this.
“Oh, but my dear Florence!” she would have cried, “You and your one hundred and sixty pounds! You an airplane stewardess!”
Jeanne was not there, so Florence, marching blissfully on, arrived in due time at the door of aviation headquarters.
“I wonder if I might see Miss Marjory Monague?” she said to the girl by the wicker window. There was a suggestion of timidness in her voice.
“Miss Monague, the chief stewardess?” The girl at the small window arched her brow. “She’s frightfully busy. But I—” She hesitated, took one more look at Florence’s face, found it clean, frank and fair as a dew-drenched hillside on a summer morning, wondered in a vague sort of way how anyone could keep herself looking like that, then said, “I—I’ll call her.”
She turned to a telephone. A moment later she said to Florence, “Miss Monague will talk to you. Go right up those stairs. It’s the last office to the right.”
To the girl beside her this one whispered, “Bet she’s going to apply as a stewardess of the air! Can you e-ee-magine!
“All the same,” she added after a moment’s silence, “I’m sorry they won’t let her. She—she’s a swell one I bet! Regular pal like you dream about sometimes.”
In the meantime Florence had made her way blithely up the stairs. “Chief stewardess,” she was thinking, “probably forty, wears horn-rim glasses, sits up straight, stares at you and says, ‘Age please?’”
She was due for a shock. The chief stewardess was not forty, nor yet twenty-five. A slim slip of a girl, she looked in her large mahogany chair not more than twenty.