her skirts sag and still loved good candy!  I mean that when he found in one half hour that I knew he wore nine dollar neckties and that I was for Roosevelt, the man nearly expired; he was that puzzled!  I’m not quite the type of working girl whom Heaven protects and he chases, but—­I mean I think he is wondering just how far Heaven really will protect my kind!  When he decides,” she confided in a final burst of laughter, and tucking away her overflowing red hair, “I may have to slap him—­I mean don’t you know—­”

And we did know.  And being in his late forties Henry began tantalizing me with odds on the Gilded Youth.  He certainly was a beautiful boy—­tall, chestnut haired, clean cut, and altogether charming.  He played Brahms and Irving Berlin with equal grace on the piano in the women’s lounge on the ship and an amazing game of stud poker with the San Francisco boys in the smoking room.  And it was clear that he regarded the Eager Soul as a social adventure somewhat higher than his mother’s social secretary—­but of the same class.  He was returning from a furlough, to drive his ambulance in France, and the Doctor was going out to join his unit somewhere in France down near the Joan of Arc country.  He told us shyly one day, as we watched the wake of the ship together, that he was to be stationed at an old chateau upon whose front is carved in stone, “I serve because I am served!” When he did not repeat the motto we knew that it had caught him.  He had been at home working on a germ problem connected with army life, hardly to be mentioned in the presence of Mrs. Boffin, and he was forever casually discussing his difficulties with the Eager Soul; and a stenographer, who came upon the two at their tete-a-tete one day, ran to the girls in the lounge and gasped, “My Lord, Net, if you’d a heard it, you’d a jumped off the boat!”

[Illustration with caption:  She often paced the rounds of the deck between us]

As the passenger list began to resolve itself into familiar faces and figures and friends we became gradually aware of a pair of eyes—­a pair of snappy black, female, French eyes.  Speaking broadly and allowing for certain Emporia and Wichita exceptions, eyes were no treat to us.  Yet we fell to talking blithely of those eyes.  Henry said if he had to douse his cigar on deck at night, the captain should make the Princess wear dimmers at night or stay indoors.  We were not always sure she was a Princess.  At times she seemed more like a Duchess or a Countess, according to her clothes.  We never had seen such clothes!  And millinery!  We were used to Broadway; Michigan Avenue did not make us shy, and Henry had been in the South.  But these clothes and the hats and the eyes—­all full dress—­were too many for us.  And we fell to speculating upon exactly what would happen on Main Street and Commercial Street in Wichita and Emporia if the Duchess could sail down there in full regalia.  Henry’s place at table was where he got the full voltage of