“Why don’t you write a ‘nut’ part for him?” asked one of them of the playwright as they surveyed me critically as if I was some rare specimen of bug life.

“That would never do,” he answered.  “Real ‘nuts’ can never play the part on the stage.  You’ve got to have a man of intelligence.”

“Look here,” I broke in.  “You’ve got to stop talking about me before my face as if I wasn’t really present.  Nuts I may be, but I can still understand English, even when badly spoken, and resent it.  Lay off that stuff or I’ll be constrained to introduce you to a new brand of ‘Biff!  Bang!’”

Saying this, I struck an heroic attitude, but it seemed to produce no startling change in their calm, deliberate examination of me.

“He’ll do, I think, as a Show Girl,” the dance-master mused dreamily.  “Like a cabbage, every one of his features is bad, but the whole effect is not revolting.  Strange, isn’t it, how such things happen.”  At this point the musician broke in.

“He ain’t agoing to dance to my music if I know it.  He’ll ruin it.”  At which remark I executed a few rather simple but nevertheless neat steps I had learned at the last charity Bazaar to which I had contributed my services, and these few steps were sufficient to close the deal.  I was signed up on the spot.  As they were leaving the barracks one excited young person ran up and halted the arrogant Thespians.  “If I get the doctor to remove my Adam’s Apple,” he pleaded wistfully, “do you think you could take me on as a pony?”

“No,” said one of them, not without a certain show of kindness.  “I fear not.  It would be necessary for him to remove the greater part of your map and graft a couple of pounds on to your sadly unendowed limbs.”

From 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.