Anyway, she got mad and left the ambulance service flat, getting into some sort of brawl with an adjutant general or something through wanting to take a mere detail out of his hands that he felt should stay right where it was, he being one of these offensive martinets and a stickler for red tape, and swollen with petty power. So Genevieve May said.
So she looked round for another way to start a few home fires burning on the other side of the Rhine. I forget what her next strategy was, but you know it was something cute and busy in a well-fitting uniform, and calculated to shorten the conflict if Germany found it out. You know that much.
I remember at one time she was riding in parades when the boys would march down to the station to go off and settle things in their own crude way. I lost track of what she was taking up for a while, but I know she kept on getting new uniforms till she must of had quite a time every morning deciding what she was going to be that day, like the father of the German Crown Prince.
Finally, last spring, it got to be the simple uniform of a waitress. She had figgered out that all the girls then taking the places of men waiters would get called for nurses sooner or later; so why shouldn't prominent society matrons like herself learn how to wait on table, so as to take the girl waiters' places when they went across? Not exactly that; they wouldn't keep on lugging trays forever in this emergency--only till they could teach new girls the trade, when some new ones come along to take the places of them that had met the call of duty.
So Genievieve agitated and wrote letters from the heart out to about two dozen society buds; and then she terrified the owner of the biggest hotel in her home town till he agreed to let 'em come and wait on table every day at lunch.
Genevieve May's uniform of a poor working girl was a simple black dress, with white apron, cuffs, and cap, the whole, as was right, not costing over six or seven dollars, though her string of matched pearls that cost two hundred thousand sort of raised the average. The other society buds was arrayed similar and looked like so many waitresses. Not in a hotel, mebbe, but in one of these musical shows where no money has been spared.