LADY CRUSOE 272

A REBELLIOUS GRANDMOTHER 310

WAIT--FOR PRINCE CHARMING 327

BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK 351

THE GAY COCKADE

THE GAY COCKADE

From the moment that Jimmie Harding came into the office, he created an
atmosphere. We were a tired lot. Most of us had been in the government
service for years, and had been ground fine in the mills of departmental
monotony.

But Jimmie was young, and he wore his youth like a gay cockade. He
flaunted it in our faces, and because we were so tired of our dull and
desiccated selves, we borrowed of him, remorselessly, color and
brightness until, gradually, in the light of his reflected glory, we
seemed a little younger, a little less tired, a little less petrified.

In his gay and gallant youth there was, however, a quality which partook
of earlier times. He should, we felt, have worn a feather in his
cap--and a cloak instead of his Norfolk coat. He walked with a little
swagger, and stood with his hand on his hip, as if his palm pressed the
hilt of his sword. If he ever fell in love, we told one another, he
would, without a doubt, sing serenades and apostrophize the moon.

He did fall in love before he had been with us a year. His love-affair
was a romance for the whole office. He came among us every morning
glorified; he left us in the afternoon as a knight enters upon a quest.

He told us about the girl. We pictured her perfectly before we saw her,
as a little thing, with a mop of curled brown hair; an oval face,
pearl-tinted; wide, blue eyes. He dwelt on all her small
perfections--the brows that swept across her forehead in a thin black
line, the transparency of her slender hands, the straight set of her
head on her shoulders, the slight halt in her speech like that of an
enchanting child.

Yet she was not in the least a child. "She holds me up to my best, Miss
Standish," Jimmie told me; "she says I can write."

We knew that Jimmie had written a few things, gay little poems that he
showed us now and then in the magazines. But we had not taken them at
all seriously. Indeed, Jimmie had not taken them seriously himself.

But now he took them seriously. "Elise says that I can do great things.
That I must get out of the Department."

To the rest of us, getting out of the government service would have
seemed a mad adventure. None of us would have had the courage to
consider it. But it seemed a n