Biltmore Oswald : The diary of a hapless recruit
that day on my life has become one of unremitting toil. Together with the rest of the Show Girls I vamp and slouch my way around the clock with ever-increasing seductiveness. We are really doing splendidly. The ponies come leaping lightly across the floor waving their freckled, muscular arms from side to side and looking very unattractive indeed in their B.V.D.'s, high shoes and sock supporters.

"I can see it all," says the Director, in an enthusiastic voice, and if he can I'll admit he has some robust quality of imagination that I fail to possess.

Us Show Girls, of course, have to be a little more modest than the ponies, so we retain our white trousers. These are rolled up, however, in order to afford the mosquitoes, who are covering the show most conscientiously, room to roost on. And sad to relate, the life is beginning to affect the boys. Only yesterday I saw one of our toughest ponies vamping up the aisle of Mess Hall No. 2 with his tray held over his head in the manner of a Persian slave girl. The Jimmy-legs, witnessing this strange sight, dropped his jaw and forgot to lift it up again. "Sweet attar of roses," he muttered. "What ever has happened to our poor, long-suffering navy?" At the door of the Mess Hall, the pony bowed low to the deck and withdrew with a coy backward flirt of his foot.

I can't express in words the remarkable appearance made by some of our seagoing chorus girls when they attempt to assume the light and airy graces of the real article. Some of the men have so deeply entered into their parts that they have attained absolute self-forgetfulness, with the result that they leap and preen about in a manner quite startling to the dispassionate spectator. My career so far has not been a personal triumph. In the middle of a number, the other night, the dancing master clapped his hands violently together, a signal he uses when he wants all motion to cease.

"Take 'em down to the end of the room, boys," he said. "I can tell three minutes ahead of time when things are going to go wrong. That man on the end didn't have a thought in his head. He would have smeared the entire number." I was the man on the end.

_May 23d._ This has not been a particularly agreeable day, although to a woman no doubt it would have been laden with moments of exquisite ecstasy. Feminine apparel for me has lost forever the charm of mystery that formerly touched it with enchantment. There is nothing I do not know now. Its innermost secret has been revealed and its revelation has brought with it its full burden of woe. All knowledge 
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