Crouched up there she was sobbing as if her heart would break.
I was afraid she would be furious that I'd come upon her like this.
But the unexpected happened. She turned and clung to me.
"Oh, Joan! I am so unhappy," she sobbed. "Oh, it's so awful. We are going away from this place, and I shall never, never see him again!"
"Man delights not me."—SHAKESPEARE.
"And the taable staained wi' his aale, an' the mud o' 'is Boots o'the stairs,An' the stink o' 'is pipe i' the 'ouse, an' the mark o' 'is 'ead o'the chairs!"—TENNYSON.
I didn't ask for any explanation.
I had the sense not to show any surprise at the self-abandonment of this usually so sturdily reserved little chum of mine.
I just plumped down on the stones beside her and slipped my arm about the sobbing little overalled body. I suppose it comforted her. For presently she left off sobbing, drew a long breath, blew her nose, and began, in a resigned little voice, to open out her whole heart to me.
"You know who I mean, Joan?"
"Yes, old kid."
The name of "Colonel Fielding" seemed to hang in the air above us as tangibly as those hazel boughs against the sky, but neither of us uttered it.
In rueful little spurts the truth began to gush from the once silent and matter-of-fact Elizabeth.
"I guessed you'd guess. Oh, Joan! I'm idiotic about him. Crazy! As silly about him as you ever were about your precious Harry in London.
"I used to laugh at you!"
"Everybody starts by laughing at people in love," I said, settling myself on that wall. "And everybody ends by being quite as silly themselves. You're no worse than anybody else."
"Yes I am, much," declared Elizabeth.
"Why? Because you've always thought you couldn't like men, and now you find you can?"
"No!" declared Elizabeth, shaking still more vigorously. "I still can't like 'men.' It is still true enough aboutthat. I still hatethem! ... You don't mind my talking, do you? I've bottled myself up so ever since I methim. But as for 'men'——"
She talked, setting out plainly and sincerely what I do believe is the attitude of a certain type of girl.
* * * * * * *
Men seldom hear it. If they do, they disbelieve it. But let them—if any of them are reading this story—be reminded that this point of view exists. Here's its creed as told me by my bonniest and best of little pals, Elizabeth Weare.
I'd heard lots of it, in scraps, already. Tonight, when she was stirred and troubled, I got it in swathes, which I scarcely interrupted.
"I don't think men are amusing," she declared. "Perhaps Ihaveno sense of humour. If it is sense of humour that makes their smoking-room stories funny, I am glad I haven't. They think those stories funny, I think them far-fetched; as if they'd been thought out with lots of trouble. It's not the improperness of them that I mind, those that are supposed to be so 'naughty.'It's the ugly sort of pictures they nearly always make. Think of any you know; don't they mean something rather horrid to look at? Men haven't enough imagination to see that's what one hates. Men laugh at those 'jokes,' with a noise like the Prices' old Jack, braying. And they tell some of them to their wives. And the wives pass them on. And the girls tell me; pretty girls, with their soft red mouths, repeat these hideous stupid Limericks and things. And I feel likecrying, Joan. Only I have to laugh, or they'd think I didn't understand. What Idounderstand is that every timeI've been put a little bit more off men!
"Then, I think men are dull. They don't hear what you say quickly enough. They don't see what it means half the time. And they aren't noticing what's going on around them. They're wrapped in afogof newspaper print and tobacco. They're slow. Slow!
"I think men are so ugly, too. Look at them in omnibuses and trains. Look at them anywhere! Are they attractive? Not to me. I don't like their nubbly knuckles and their huge feet (not that I need talk in these land boots, but still)—I can't bear those great wrists they have. I hate their horrid skins where they shave—all nutmeg-graters! How any girl wants to be kissed by them I don't know. I don't suppose she does really; it's just the Idea. Bristly moustaches, too. Awful!
"They do such hideous things, men. What can be more revolting than the sight of one of them knocking out a dirty, smelly black pipe? Or wolfing down a plateful of half-raw steak? Or mopping up—as they call it—a fat pint of beer out of a pewter pot? I could not love one after seeing him do those things!" declared Elizabeth.
"Yet women do, my dear," I reminded her. "They like a man to be even rather rough-hewn and coarse-fibred, so that he is unlike them. They don't mind his smelling of tobacco, and wearing scratchy tweeds, and tanks on his feet. They like him rugged. I—I speak for myself and for the majority of girls, I think. They like him 'manly.'"
"Heavens!" ejaculated Elizabeth, with equal fervour and truth in her voice. "How I do loathe what they call 'a manly man'! All lumps, and a bull's voice, and irregular features!"
"But," I suggested mildly, "you wouldn't want a man to look like the picture off a chocolate-box lid?"
"I should adore it," declared this exception in girls. "When I was a little girl, once, I was given a box of sweets with a picture on the lid called 'The Falconer.' He wore a golden-brown hunting-dress and he had a hawk on his shoulder, and golden hair and soft eyes, and, oh! such a pretty face! I thought at the time, 'If only I could ever see a young man looking like that Falconer!' And now I have. Colonel Fielding is exactly like that picture. Oh, Joan, I think he's the most beautiful thing I've seen."
How true it is that when a really reserved person breaks down the barriers it will babble out ten times more than some one who is more expansive in every-day life!
I, for instance, should never have dreamt of calling any young man "the most beautiful thing I'd seen." Not Harry, handsome as he was. Not Captain Holiday, though he was good-looking enough for any girl to rave over; manly good looks, too. Very different from the namby-pamby prettiness of Elizabeth's young Colonel! Personally, I considered that it would take more than his D.S.O. and the devotion of his men to their officer to make one forget that he could dress up and look exactly like a girl!
Yet here was the boyish, resolute, no-nonsense-about-her Elizabeth glorying in the fact!
Again the force of Contrast, I supposed.
Well! Well, if the Man-hater were drawn to him I could only hope it was for her happiness. She didn't look happy at the moment, sitting there on that wall, her chin on her knees and her hands hugging her gaitered legs.
"To think," she mourned, "that at last I've met the sort of man that I could care for—even I who never do care for them!—and that it's no good!'
"Why 'no good,' my dear? Because we're going away? But he's not going to stay in Careg himself for ever! Besides, he'll write to you. He always did about the flat, and he will more now," I comforted her. "I know he likes you."
With her characteristic gesture my chum shook her head till her hair danced about her face.
"He does like you," I persisted. "I saw it when he met you first! And at the concert he threw that red carnation straight for you to catch! I suppose you've kept it?"
A rueful laugh from Elizabeth, a movement of her hand to the breast of her smock. Kept it? It was her treasure. Oh, yes. She'd got it badly.
"Besides," I went on, "he met you. He came to talk to you. He wanted to see you——"
"He used to! But not now!" broke despairingly from the little figure on the wall. "That's the worst of it! To begin with, he—he did like me! I was almost sure of it! But not since that girl came down here to take him from me!"
"Which girl?"
In a tone of passionate despair Elizabeth pronounced the name.
"Muriel Elvey!"
"Muriel—oh, my dear girl, no. That's absurd."
But nothing would persuade Elizabeth that it wasn't true. She had seen Muriel, who was so lovely that every man must fall in love with her. She had seen her at the concert, where Colonel Fielding was talking to her every minute that he was not singing. She'd seen her at the Tests, still with Colonel Fielding in attendance. She, Miss Elvey, was staying at The Lodge, where Colonel Fielding was also staying. Oh! Elizabeth knew what would happen.
I wished I did! Personally, I thought it very unlikely that Muriel meant to look at Colonel Fielding; but was she going to marry her host, Captain Holiday? In the meantime she was causing the bitterest jealousy to both me and my poor little chum!
To think that this was Elizabeth who had strafed me about fretting over what any young man had said or done!
"I wish I hadn't come," she mourned; "and now it will almost kill me to go."
Here she stopped, starting as if shot. She lifted her head from her knees and sprang off the low wall.
There had been a rustling of the leaves that I'd thought was the breeze; but Elizabeth had heard and recognized the light footstep that accompanied that rustling.
Another moment and there appeared before us the slim figure and half-girlish face of the man who was the cause of all this agitation.
I looked hard at him as he saluted and said "How do you do?"
He blushed—yes, he had that trick of blushing which camouflages some of the effrontery of some of the least diffident of men. I realized now that it was all a "put-on"—his quietness, his nervousness, his seeming shyness.
"Er—er—I'm so glad I happened to come across you," he said. "The fact is I've something I—I rather wanted to ask you—you two people."
How deprecatingly he spoke, but what a gleam of mischief there was behind those ridiculously long lashes of his! What did he really mean?
I saw him again as I'd seen him at that concert, dressed up in that successful imitation of a Spanish beauty, singing in a contralto that would have lured the bird from the tree, taking in half the audience by his mock "glad eye" at Captain Holiday, and finally tossing that red flower into the little brown paw of the Land Girl whom he most admired. Not too milk-and-watery, all that! And as Elizabeth herself defended him later, "It's not by being namby-pamby that a man gets the D.S.O." In spite of his distressingly—to me—pretty-pretty appearance, there were depths in this idol of Elizabeth's.
Now what had he come to say?
"Er," he began, "I've heard you finished your training and are going away from here."
"Yes, we're off on Monday," Elizabeth said quite steadily.
He tapped against a moss-covered stick with his cane, and went on, as if shyly:
"Er—Holiday told me something of the sort. Do—do you like the job you're going to?"
"We don't know yet," said I, cheerfully enough. "I expect we shall."
"Oh! Holiday didn't know—that is, I expect Holiday might be rather annoyed if he thought I'd said anything to you about this," returned this maddeningly puzzling young man. "But, still, it was an idea of his. And—er—I don't see how he could find out if he didn't ask you himself, do you?"
Together Elizabeth and I demanded, "Ask us what?"
"Well, Holiday wondered if you two would care to stay on at the farm," suggested Captain Fielding.
I saw Elizabeth's head go up.
"Stay on?" I echoed. "But we've finished our training!"
"Er—yes. But the Prices want two more land-workers to take the places of two more men they've had called up. And Holiday thought that—er—since they're pleased with you, and you've got through the exam.—well, it could be managed," concluded Colonel Fielding, diffidently. "It depends upon whether you'd like to stay on jobs there. Would you?"
Here was a question!
To go—or to stay on?
In less time than it takes you to read about it I'd revolved it rapidly in my own mind as I stood there by that wall under the hazels, glancing from Elizabeth to the young officer who had made the suggestion.
To go meant good-bye to so many things I'd come to care for. Good-bye to the Prices, the gentle giant and his dainty wife, to whom her silvered hair gave the look of a little French marquise; good-bye to their kindliness and interest—not every land-worker finds employers as helpful and as considerate. However charming the Rectory people might turn out to be I could not hope that they would come up to these kind people.
It meant good-bye to the Practice Farm, of which I'd become attached to every field, every distant view, every shed—even the celebrated cow-house that I'd cleaned out on that first morning! Good-bye to the merry midday meals in the jolly kitchen! Good-bye to the dear old white mare, and the cows who now knew me well! Good-bye to the morning tramp to work through the dew-spangled, ferny lanes! Good-bye, too, to the life in camp; good-bye to Vic, the irresistible Cockney, to Sybil, and little Peggy with her "I'm astonished at you!"—to Curley, to the red-haired Aggie with her rich Welsh voice, and to the young forewoman who had mothered the whole mixed lot of us!
We had been one big family; I had found sisters of every class and kind. Now I had to leave them all, after sharing their life and their hearts, for six unforgettable weeks. To part—with the chance that we should never meet again! It's the fate that breaks up so many a cheery mess, both in the Army and the Land Army! To go meant all this.
But to stay meant, for me, seeing Captain Holiday still. How could I grow to forget him and thrust him out of my mind, as I hoped, if I knew that round any corner I should meet him still, the golden-and-white collie trailing at his heels? How could I grow resigned and philosophical, and all those things which I meant to be, if I had the constant pain of seeing him with Muriel? (The Elveys, by the way, seemed to be staying on indefinitely at the Lodge.) Oh, I thought that to stay was the very worst thing I could do for myself!
But then I hadn't only myself to think about.
At the very sound of the words "stay on" I'd seen Elizabeth's small face lighted up as if by a ray of sunshine from within. She'd turned it hastily away again. But well I knew what her sentiments were!
So I decided in an instant.
"Oh! If it could be arranged! Of course we'd both prefer to stay on here. We'll stay!" I said, without hesitating.
Enormous relief appeared in the very tilt of Elizabeth's Board of Agriculture hat. As for the young Colonel—what did he think or feel? Was he interested in my little infatuated chum, or wasn't he? Was he just another slave at the chariot wheels of the all-conquering Muriel? And what had he said to Captain Holiday about our staying here? Or had it been the other young man's idea? Afterwards I wondered very much about this.
Why had Captain Holiday thought of us? The Practice Farm was on his land but what had the actual working of it got to do with him, he being merely down in this part of the country on sick leave like his friend, Colonel Fielding?
Further, I wondered how much longer Muriel and her mother would be here, and when the coy, uncertain, and hard-to-please Muriel would make up her mind whom she wanted to marry?
"Go see the wholesome country girls make hay,Whose brown hath lovelier graceThan many a painted face,That I do knowHyde Park can show."
All these questions were still there, unanswered, a fortnight later.
That date found Elizabeth and me settled as permanent Land-workers under our friend Mr. Price, but still living in camp, whence we walked to our work. It found Curley gone; she had taken the Rectory job; Sybil, too, was away. She had got the post of gardening girl at a country house outside Careg that supplied the hospital with extra vegetables. The Elveys were still at the Lodge, for poor Mrs. Elvey had had a rheumatic attack and could not move. Very probably, thought I with a pang, Miss Muriel did not want to move!
All this marked the date of the beginning of one of the farm's biggest days—the gathering in of the second hay crop.
I shall never forget this as one of the greatest scrambles that I've ever rushed through. A "thick day" at the office was nothing to it!
It was intensely hot. The sky was cloudless, not blue, but a sultry mauve.
Now at dinner-time Mr. Price strode in on his inordinately long legs that he had given no rest since early morn; his blue eyes were alert and excited.
"The glass is going down," he said. "And I heard thunder beyond the town. I'll tell you what. I believe it'll be a race between a big storm—and us getting in that field of hay!"
Little Mrs. Price lifted her tiny, dignified face as she sat at table.
"We'll have to do it then," said she. "Everybody will help."
"Everybody it'll have to be," declared Mr. Price, dispatching his dinner full speed ahead. "Everybody on the farm. And I'll see if some of the wounded boys can take a hand. And you get every one of the workmen's wives, too. Tell them to leave their washing, leave their baking, bring their babies to the corner of the field and all come!"
Off went Mrs. Price to mobilize these volunteers. Out we dashed—the Regulars.
It was indeed all hands to the pumps—that breathless afternoon.
The big field seemed to hold half Careg; farm hands, old men, boys in hospital blue, rosy-faced women in sun-bonnets—these last were the workmen's wives whom Mrs. Price had fetched. They worked like niggers. And as we toiled the air grew more breathless; the pale mauve of the sky deepened to an angry indigo, and far away we heard a muttering of thunder. The storm was gathering slowly.
I felt myself becoming part of a regiment, part of a willing machine that walked quickly down the rows raking the fragrant swathes.
Should we do it? Should we get in that hay in time, beat the on-rolling field-grey clouds that were coming up, massed like German divisions?
It was exciting. It was for the moment the most important thing in the world that that field should be cleared before the thunder-rain came on to spoil all.
I raked, handling the rake with ease and rhythm; I scarcely realized who walked just in front of me, or that the two shirt-sleeved figures—one with an absurdly slim waist!—were Captain Holiday and Colonel Fielding.
Steadily the storm was coming up, but steadily we worked.
"We shall do it!" declared little Mrs. Price, as she passed me once, "we shall have time for tea and all!"
Presently, as I raked in front of the road-gate, I saw our organizing secretary fling herself off her bicycle and run up.
"Mrs. Price!" she called. "What can I do to help?"
"Cut bread and butter if you like!" laughed the farmer's wife. "It's tea-time, and we've earned it! I'm just going to bring out a white cloth and two big loaves, and a huge bowl of butter, and the kettle, and tea in bags! Yes, come on!"
Twenty minutes later the last load of hay was carried. The haymakers sat down on the grass in the corner of the field to feast their achievement, farmfolk groups and little clusters, friends, families together. Mr. Price seated himself in triumph on the cutter, waving a cup at the threatening purple skies.
"We've done it!" he cried. "We have, indeed!"
I had cast myself down in the nearest shady patch, had thrown off my hat, and dried my streaming forehead. Life was extraordinarily good at that moment; I felt it surging in fulness through every vein. I was heated and spent for the instant; but how happy! Work is an anodyne; but it must be the right kind of work. This had been splendid. I'd forgotten everything else!
I stuffed my handkerchief into my sleeve, and came to myself to find that in my shady corner I was one of a group of four.
Elizabeth had thrown herself down close beside me. Next to her the slim Colonel had sat down. Opposite to me, holding out bread and butter on a large burdock leaf, was Captain Holiday.
The quartette of us devoured our tea together with an enjoyment which was, as Captain Holiday presently said through a mouthful, barely decent!
"Why?" demanded Colonel Fielding, with that misleading diffidence of his. "Why shouldn't we—er—enjoy this? I—I may tell you that this"—he drank more tea, reached for another hunk of bread and butter, and looked sideways at Elizabeth—"this is going to represent one of the meals of my life!"
I said, rather tritely, "That's because you worked so hard for it!"
"Oh—er—no. I don't think I like anything I've deserved," said this young man, with (outward) mildness. Much faith I put in that as he began on his fourth hunk, eating by tiny mouthfuls as he must have been taught in the nursery. "Anything one's earned makes one feel—er—one doesn't want it any more. At least, I feel like that——"
"Not often, my dear chap," put in his friend, Captain Holiday, brusquely. "If you were dependent upon what you earned or deserved—by gad, you would be fairly destitute!"
Now it always amuses me the way in which men will show warm regard for a special chum by insulting him in public. But Elizabeth, over her white japanned mug of tea, shot a really furious glance at the man who had dared to say this thing to her idol!
Colonel Fielding just laughed through those eyelashes, nodded good-naturedly at his friend, and took up the conversation again as he lounged on the grass.
Hoping for Elizabeth's sake that what he said might tell something about him, I prepared to listen to every word of it!
Now, as we sat in that field, between the blond stubble and lowering purple sky, there was one thing the others didn't guess.
I wouldn't have changed places with a Queen. Just to be so near Captain Holiday, rested and feasting after work, was sheer joy to me. He would never know.
But it was odd to find his friend, Colonel Fielding, suddenly putting my thoughts into words!
He repeated his own words of a moment before.
"Yes, this is one of 'the' feasts," he said softly. "Tea and bread and butter in a hayfield. And—er—absolutely topping. It's Enjoyment; pukka. It's what people are always chasing. They flock to—er—the most expensive restaurants in town for this. They go on to boxes at theatres, supper clubs. It's what they order champagne for. Jazz bands. Dressing up to the nines. All to get it! They—er—they don't get it," murmured the young Colonel, in his meekest of meek voices. "You can't buy it. It comes to you—or it doesn't. Fact."
Nobody said anything. Fielding continued:
"When people look back on the best time they've ever had, they don't find that those are the times that—er—that have swallowed up every stiver at Cox's. No. Nor the times when they set out deliberately to do themselves well, and—er—dash the expense. No! As often as not,thatis a wash-out. Er—I don't know why. But somehow the best time nearly always comes down to something that costs hardly anything."
Captain Holiday, smoking, gave a sort of non-committal grunt.
Meanwhile Elizabeth was listening spellbound to the homily on Life's Good Times, given by the young officer, who talked as if he were the shyest of the shy—but whose shyness did not stop him from holding forth.
"A woman once told me," the Colonel began again.
Here I saw Elizabeth prick up her ears even more, if possible!
The Colonel saw it too. The smile he gave might have been the smile of some coquette who, deliberately "playing" her lover, sees him "rise." Ah, if Elizabeth looked like that Princess who on her bridal-night was metamorphosed into a lad, this slim Colonel might have been the bridegroom who, to keep her love, was bewitched in turn into becoming a Princess....
He went on:
"Yes, a woman who's taught me rather a lot about women once told me that the most delightful lunch of her life was—er—was in a poisonous little musty coffee-room of a country pub."
Here Captain Holiday put in: "What induced you to take herthere?"
A gleam of mischief behind the Colonel's lashes, but no reply to this.
"It was stuffy with the smell of bygone chops," he enlarged dreamily. "It was hung with huge dark oil-paintings of spaniels, and horses, and wild duck and things, and there were umpteen hulking sauceboats on each sideboard; all very plated and dirty——"
"How fascinating," snapped Elizabeth.
"The table decorations," pursued Colonel Fielding, "were five napkins arranged as mitres and a tall 'fluted ruby' glass vase full of dead daffodils——"
"May one ask what the unfortunate lady was given to eat?"
"She was given cold ham, Miss Weare, tinned apricots, and black Indian tea at three o'clock in the afternoon——"
"How extraordinarily nasty," sniffed Elizabeth, obviously wrung with jealousy of the woman who had thus lunched.
Deprecatingly, Colonel Fielding smiled. "This woman told me," he said, "that she knew now what was meant by the expression 'A Priceless Binge.' It was that lunch. She would not have exchanged a crumb of it for two years of living at the Ritz."
How well I understood that woman's point of view! I opened my mouth to say so; then I saw that Captain Holiday, leaning up on his elbow on the grass, was watching me hard behind a cloud of smoke.
Why? Curiosity again? I said nothing.
"I suppose that woman meant that the person she was lunching with made all the difference in the world to her?" said Elizabeth, whose small, brown paw had been pulling quite viciously at the grass during these last remarks, in the voice of bravado.
"Well," he replied, "I believe that she did happen to be lunching at the time with 'the person' she cared rather a lot about. He was—er—an old love or something she hadn't seen for ages. At least—I think it must have been that."
"You 'think'!" I said exasperated. "You don't know?"
"No," returned the young Colonel, "I couldn't ask her, could I?"
"Why not?" demanded Captain Holiday, with his abruptness.
"How could I ask her if she didn't choose to tell me?" Colonel Fielding answered very gently.
Here I thought there had been enough of this hair-splitting; besides, I couldn't bear to see Elizabeth's afternoon being spoilt.
So, bluntly and directly, I blurted out:
"But, Colonel Fielding, wasn't it you that this woman was having lunch with when she said that?"
"I?" He opened his eyes at me just as Muriel might have done, and I thought exasperatedly what a lot of girl's tricks he had. Still, one girl adored him for them. I saw poor Elizabeth sitting there doing it at that moment.
"I?" he said. "Oh, no. I—er—wasn't there, that time. I wasn't—the fact is I wasn't born. My mother only told me about it lately."
Elizabeth stopped pulling up the stubble with a jerk, and at the same moment I said sharply, "Your mother—but what's your mother got to do with it, Colonel Fielding?"
"She was the woman who had lunch," explained the young man simply. "She—er—is the woman who's taught me most things, I think. I always think men might learn more from their mothers than any other woman allows 'em to—er—know. 'You'll get a sweetheart any day, but not anothah mothah!' D'you know that song, Miss Weare?"
Villain! He had simply been "trying it on," "playing up"! He was quite "up" to the fact of Elizabeth's jealousy. And now he was equally "up" to the look of exquisite relief that was lighting her up again—just as it had done when she found she was not to go away after all.
All this, I thought, was cruel.
I turned to Captain Holiday, who was just laughing—at this rate I should soon change places with my chum. I should become the Man-Hater. Men were too irritating, too little worth all this trouble and affection that we lavish upon them!
But, in the meantime, we had forgotten the storm. Suddenly it broke out, deafeningly, over our heads.
"Ah!" exclaimed Captain Holiday sharply, springing to his feet.
We followed his example.
"Here it is," he cried. "The storm!"
"Lightning may come, straight rains and tiger sky."—MEREDITH.
I turned up my face. Splash! came the first huge thunder drop upon it.
"Run for it. Run for the farm!" exclaimed both the men. I saw Colonel Fielding's slender hand dart out and catch that sunburnt paw of Elizabeth's as they dashed after the farmer's wife. Hand in hand they ran over the field like children, laughing like children too—and I knew this would be another of "THE" moments of life to my little chum.
I was legging it after them when I was stopped as if by a shot. From behind me there was a sharp cry.
"Joan! Joan!"
I turned to the corner under the elms where we had been picnicking. Every one had left it in their dash for cover before the rain came on. Only Captain Holiday was there; he stood, his back to the biggest elm, his hands spread out behind him on the trunk, his face ghastly white.
"Joan!" he called like a child.
I ran back to him.
"What's the matter?" I asked anxiously. "Has your knee let you down?"—I knew that one of his wounds had been in the knee—"Where are you hurt?"
"I'm not hurt," he said, and tried to smile. "Only I——"
Crashing thunder drowned his voice. Then I saw an odd thing happen. His whole body seemed to shrink and flatten itself against that tree. He caught his hands away from the bark and covered his face. He was in an agony.
I hurried to him. He clutched my arm.
"Don't go," he muttered. "I say, I'm mad sorry, but I can't help it. I thought I was right again. I've been like this ever since the Somme. Those guns—I'm afraid you'll have to stay with me. I can't move from here yet. You see I——"
Crash! came the thunder just above us again. He shook as it rolled away. Then in a whisper that seemed torn from him I heard him say: "I'm frightened of that."
I could have cried. For in a flash as of the lightning now playing above the hills I seemed to understand all.
Shell-shock! This healthy and normal young man had been through every horror of war, and I knew how bravely. Some of the wounded soldiers at the hospital had been in his old company; they had had plenty of tales to tell. He was as plucky as any lion—but he was "done in" now. Thunder, that brought back to him the guns of that hell in which he had been last wounded, found him paralysed and helpless with shock.
I took both his hands.
"I'll stay with you," I said as comfortingly as I could. "Come to the other side of the tree, it's absolutely sheltered there." I sat down, leaning against the trunk. "Sit down by me."
I remembered how often I had been told as a child not to shelter under trees in a thunderstorm, but what else was there to do?
The big warm thunder-drops, that had been coming one by one, were now pattering faster and faster on the leaves. Again the thunder crashed; Captain Holiday crouched up close to me. I found myself slipping my arm about his neck—he was trembling. What else could I do? I heard him say "Thank you, dear." And he put his head down on my shoulder. He buried his brown face against my overall when the next crash came.
Yes! He clung to me for comfort as if there were no other help for him in the world. At that moment there was no other.
What a half-hour! I felt I must be dreaming. Could it be I, Joan Matthews, Land Girl, who was sitting there? Yes; here was my own overalled arm round the quite solid-feeling neck of the young man; it was my own shoulder against which his head was refuged. Once I was nearly, nearly sure I felt his lips against the rough holland of my smock—but that was a chance touch. Once I found myself wishing wildly that the storm need never stop, and that I could stay here like this for ever, not moving, not speaking!
To speak would mean a drop out of the seventh heaven and back to Britain in war-time, to a world full of disappointments—and Muriel.
Even Muriel would never be able to take this one little half-hour from me when I had been Dick Holiday's only help in distress, when he had just once said "Dear" to me; even if he hardly knew in his agitation to whom he was speaking!
I should always have one perfect memory.
It was he who spoke first, in the lull that came after thunder that seemed now receding.
He lifted his head at last, and said huskily:
"Joan, I'm afraid you'll think I'm the limit. I mean you'll never think anything of me again! Cold feet—a coward!"
"A coward? You?" I retorted.
Tears rushed into my eyes again. I was red with conflicting emotions.
The young soldier beside me was still pale. I looked at his downcast face.
"You think I think you're the kind of man who gets cold feet?" I cried.
My voice shook with reproach.
"Oh!" I exclaimed, "how horrid of you to say such a thing."
At this he sat up straight under that tree and looked at me. A more normal expression came over his face.
"Horrid?" he echoed.
And then in quite his own brusque, ragging voice he declared:
"Mention any subject on earth to a woman, and she'll always find the unexpected comment. Always! Anyhow, this woman will. I don't understand why you've just called me 'horrid,' Joan!"
"You don't understand me at all when you think I understand so little," I said bitterly. "As if I didn't realize what it meant for a man to be wrecked by shell-shock. As if I thought it was the same thing as his being frightened, cowardly! Good heavens! As if I didn't know how you'd behaved out in France, Captain Holiday?"
Resentfully I wound up: "But you will persist in thinking me a fool!" I said bitterly.
Now he was quite himself again.
"Why should I think you a fool?" he barked.
"I don't know!" I barked in return.
Staring at the now abating rain, I suggested sharply: "Perhaps you laugh at me for being on land work at all?"
Captain Holiday turned, looked hard at me. I thought he would snap again. Instead of that he replied gently.
"Land work? Honestly I think it's the noblest work women can do today."
He glanced at the hayfield, cleared only that afternoon, gleaming under the rain.
"Cramped occupations, unhealthy city life, flat chests, specialists' fees—all swept away!" he said musingly. "Land work would help us to that, you know. Land work would give us rosier wives, better babies"—then he turned upon me with his abruptest question—"I suppose you think it's odd of me to think of such things?"
"Certainly not. I agree with every word you say," I assured him. "Only——"
I was thinking of Muriel. Land work and she were as the poles apart, yet he loved her (or so I was driven to suppose). And yet he clung to his ideals of a country life!
"Only—what?" he took me up. "What were you going to say?"
"That girl you spoke to me about the other evening," I said, "that girl who won't say either 'Yes' or 'No' to you—'the' girl—what does she think about all this?"
He paused for a moment and glanced at the sky.
Presently he turned those grey and friendly eyes of his upon me again. They smiled very sweetly as he answered my question.
"She? Oh! She thinks as I'd like her to think."
So then I knew he must be completely under Muriel's sway. That lovely, super-civilized girl could "take him in" about her views on any subject. If she wanted him to believe that she hated town and luxury and only loved roughing it on the land, he would believe her.
He was all hers!
Suddenly chilled, and sore at heart, I got up. I took a step outside the shelter of those elms that had seen my wonderful half-hour. It was over, over. All over!
"And the world grew green in the blue."FOLK-SONG.
"It has stopped raining," I said. "What is the time?"
He turned his wrist.
"A quarter past six," he said. "You're supposed to have knocked off?"
"Yes, but I expect Elizabeth is waiting at the farm. Good-bye, Captain Holiday."
"Good-bye!" But he was walking by my side across the field. "I haven't thanked you yet for being good to me."
"Please don't."
"All right! I won't!" said he serenely. Striding by my side, he came on as far as the farmyard gate.
He opened it for me.
Then, leaning on the gate, he lingered. In quite his old manner he launched a question.
"D'you miss town much?"
I laughed.
All about me there went up that sweet incense of the country earth after rain; the ever-vivid colours of the Welsh landscape were heightened to brilliance; each twig of the hedge had its hanging diamonds. Across the green breast of the hill behind the farm there lay, striped like a medal-ribbon, the end of the rainbow. Hope and gaiety smiled from every inch of the rain-washed country; and I echoed: "Miss town? Not now, thank you."
"But you did at first, Joan."
"Oh, yes," I admitted. "Badly."
"Then why did you ever leave it? I've often wondered," said Captain Holiday. "Why did you come away?"
I hesitated. How could I tell him about Harry?
"It was a toss-up whether I stayed or came," I said.
Still leaning on that gate, Captain Holiday said: "I'm glad the country won that toss."
Still leaning on the gate, Captain Holiday said: "I'm glad the country won that toss"Still leaning on the gate, Captain Holiday said: "I'mglad the country won that toss"
Sweet of him, and friendly! But it meant no more than mere friendliness.
I fought down a sigh.
"Good-bye," I said again.
He did not move from the gate. He just went on with the conversation.
"So you came here; left London. Sometimes one hates leaving—places, I mean, of course."
I said rather bitterly, "Yes—places."
"Not people?" he took up, with a very quick tilt of his head.
What could one say? I agreed.
"Oh, people are hard enough to leave sometimes."
"Are they?" he said, looking down at me. I could not meet his friendly eyes. I moved to go on.
Then at last he took his arm from that gate and followed me through it, shutting it behind him.
"Perhaps there were people who were hard to leave in London?"
What right had he to say it? I was angry with him. Considering he had his own love-story to attend to, why should he question me still—try to find out how love had treated me? What business was it of his?
Temper flamed up in me.
"No! When I left town to join up there was nobody I minded leaving. Else I should not have left. The—the people I should have hated to leave had left themselves!"
My voice grew harder as the memory of Harry Markham surged back into my mind. Black eyes, red tabs, soft caressing voice that promised "all things to all women," tender ways—how I had adored him. And how completely that adoration had died away now!
Oh, the unexpected things that happen in life; nearly always in our own selves! But I didn't intend to give any of that away to this other young man who stood beside me, quietly attentive to what I was saying, outside that closed green door.
I put out my hand; but his was on the latch before me. He held it there as if he were just going to open it for me.
"Oh! So 'they' had left." He took up, in his quiet steady voice.
"Yes," I said defiantly. "If you must know, and it seems as if you always must know everything about everybody——"
"Not everything," he assured me seriously, "and not about everybody. Only some things, and about my—well, I can say we are friends, can't I?"
This, of course, melted me again to him. I had to look away, back over the yard, the cloister-like sheds, the now-smiling country beyond.
"Friends? Oh, yes," I said.
"Then tell me what you were going to say when you began, 'if you must know'?"
Still looking away, I finished the sentence.
"If you must know," I said, "'they' sailed for Salonika days before I left London."
Very quickly he said:
"That was why you left?"
"Yes," I admitted.
The main lines of the story were known to him now. I didn't care.
Speaking as lightly as I could, I said:
"Well! That's that. D'you think you've had enough questions answered for one day, Captain Holiday?"
"'Dick' is my name really," he observed for the second time that day; "and I'd like to ask one other question, if I may. Don't imagine that I don't know it's neck my asking. I do know better. But I'm going to ask. Do you——"
Even he hesitated for a moment. Then went on:
"Do you hear from—these people?"
"These people in Salonika?"
"Yes. From him," said Captain Holiday.
There flashed into my head the thought that had I been Muriel I should have replied neither "Yes" nor "No" to this question. It's the successful type of girl who always "keeps a man guessing" about everything she does, or means, or is. But I was cursed from my cradle by the fairies with the quality of truthfulness. Out it came now.
"Write to me! No," I replied definitely. "Not a line! Not a word! I shall never hear from him again. I shall probably never see him again as long as I live!"
And to avoid being asked more questions on this sore subject, I looked meaningly at Captain Holiday's hand holding the latch of the back door. At once he opened it.
"I want to speak to the Prices," he said, and followed me through the slate-paved scullery into the big light kitchen.
It seemed full as a railway station of people gathered about the wood fire, sheltering or drying after that storm.
On the settle a dainty but ruffled figure in pale mauve was sitting and holding out tiny silk-stockinged feet to the blaze; her drenched white kid shoes stood on the range. Muriel caught in the wet!
She turned as I came in.
"Hullo, Joan; talk of angels!" she said.
Talk of angels, indeed. My eyes had flown past her to the man's figure standing close to the fire that lighted up his red tabs.
There he was, the very man of whom we had been talking. The man of whom I'd said I should never see him again as long as I lived!
I was face to face again with Harry Markham!
* * * * * * *
After the first moment of blankest astonishment, I realized that this was not so very startling after all.
Harry, here?
Well, I knew he was back from Salonika. I knew he had a staff job in town. Town, after all, is still within a day's journey from these depths of mid-Wales. I also knew that Captain Harry Markham had always had a bit of a reputation as "a leave-hog." I need not be so amazed that he had secured a week's freedom out of that old General of his.
As to why he should spend it in Careg—well, I think trout-stream and a jolly little inn were the explanations that the young man offered in those first hectic moments, filled by spasmodic hand-shaking and those inevitable remarks of: "I say, fancy coming across you here!" and "You're looking jolly fit," and all the other things people say on these occasions, whether they are thinking about them or about something totally different, or wondering how soon they can get away.
It was a curiously mixed crowd in the Prices' hospitable kitchen!
It was like the collections of people you sometimes meet in a dream. I felt as if it were some dream that brought me there to the man whom I had adored, with the man whom I adored now, and with the girl who had taken them both away from me!
With very mixed feelings I let myself down on a kitchen chair near the big grandfather clock. I felt as if I must be "looking," as Vic might have put it, "all ways for daylight." Fortunately nobody there had much time to notice me.
There were Harry and Captain Holiday ("my cousin, you know, whose place this is!") to be introduced by Muriel Elvey. (A characteristically questioning look, here, from Captain Holiday at the new man; at whom he stared before whilst I was shaking hands.)
Then I watched Harry being introduced to Colonel Fielding, who, by the way, had left Elizabeth's side and was now sitting on the arm of the oaken settle by Muriel, in an attitude suggesting that she, Muriel, was the only girl to whom he'd paid any attention in his life. Wretch! It had wiped all the joy and sparkle out of my chum's face once again.
Then there was more tea suggested, more cigarettes handed round, spills lighted at that comforting blaze. I listened, just as detachedly as if I were in the auditorium of a theatre, to the buzz of talk that went up around me—chatter about the hay-carrying, the recent storm, and the weather prospects for the morrow of which Mr. Price, looming tall against the window, seemed rather doubtful.
"Miss Elvey's sweet little white shoes!" Mrs. Price's cheerful voice broke in. "Don't let them scorch. I do hope they are not ruined——"
"You will have to take to boots and leggings, yet, Miss Elvey," demurely from the young Colonel.
"Oh, can you imagine me!" from Muriel, toasting her mauve-silk clad toes. "Colonel Fielding, think of little me in those clodhopping things! Of course, I think it wonderful of people to wear them!" with a glance at Elizabeth. "I ought really to be on the Land myself—now, why do you laugh, Mr. Price?" with a pout at the farmer. "I believe you think I shouldn't be very useful!"
"Well, indeed, I don't think you would," declared the gentle giant with an indulgent smile. "Only ornamental!"
"How horrid of you! I've a good mind to join up and show you! It's only that I can't leave mother. But I adore the country really, don't I, Dick? I was longing to come and make hay. I brought Captain Markham out on purpose, and then the rain came and we had to fly in here.
"If you only knew how I admired all these splendid girls who are so brave and strong, and who simply don't mind how they get themselves all burnt and rough for evening dress!" declared Muriel, with a glance at me as I sat mum. "I should look a perfect fright! I know I should!" twittered Muriel, glancing at Harry.
I saw Harry smile back at Muriel as he'd often smiled at me. He murmured something about sunburn being sacrilege in some cases.
Muriel laughed back.
"Of course, if you're a man you can get as burnt as a brick and it doesn't matter," she said. "You're so brown I hardly knew you at the station!" Then casually to me: "Joan, don't you think Harry's got frightfully much thinner and sunburnt since he went out to Salonika?"
At that word I met Captain Holiday's clear straight glance.
It was directly upon me.
I saw that he'd seen. He knew! Yes! He'd tumbled to it that this Captain Markham who had lately come from Salonika was the man to whom I'd referred as "people" that had sailed for Salonika before I left London.
Why had I ever opened my mouth about that?
For now Dick Holiday, who was in love with Muriel, knew the whole of my silly, humiliating little tragedy.
I felt that it was written on my face anyhow.
I turned away, wishing that the tiled kitchen floor would swallow me up.
As I turned Elizabeth was at my elbow.
"Let's go home," she muttered forlornly.
We slipped out of the party without any leave-taking. Silently we made our way back to camp. And I am sure that to hear us laughing with Miss Easton and Vic, to see us fox-trotting together to the rowdiest record on the Camp gramophone, you would never have guessed that the Man-hater and I were about the most miserable pair of girls in the Land Army that night!
"'Tis Love breeds love in me, and cold disdainKills that again."—DONNE.
With the morning we had pulled ourselves together again. Not a word did Elizabeth address to me on the subject of our having met my old love in attendance on Muriel. Not a syllable did I say to her about the object of her own misplaced affections, that finished and unscrupulous flirt, that philanderer more accomplished than Harry—Colonel Fielding. The name of Captain Holiday was not mentioned. In fact, there might not have been "such a thing as young men" in our world that morning.
A wet morning it had turned out! Hay-culling would be out of the question. This we knew even before we scrambled into our brown Land Army mackintoshes and splashed away down the road.
Elizabeth congratulated herself on the nice dry indoor job that would be hers, for Mrs. Price was going to let us take turns at helping her on baking-day, and this was the turn of my chum.
As for me, I found that I should also be kept out of the wet. My morning's work was in the big shearing-shed, turning the shearing-machine for Ivor, the shepherd. He held down the fat lambs on a wooden bench set on the great black floor-sheet of tarpaulin, and went slowly and methodically to work with a sort of twelve-pointed clipping-knife over the body of the lamb, while I turned the big red wheel with its belt and pipe attached to the knife. It was not hard work, but quite soothing—rather like knitting!
And I was at this occupation when I had a visitor, brought in by Mr. Price. It was none other than young Colonel Fielding, who asked diffidently whether he might take a turn and give a hand either to Ivor or Miss Matthews.
Ivor, a blond, quiet man in a dark-blue linen coat, looked up and smiled benignantly upon this slim young officer. Ivor had no English, Mr. Price explained, but he understood pretty well everything else. Especially everything about sheep.
"Then—er—you're lucky to have had him turned down by the doctor, and to be able to keep him on the farm," said Colonel Fielding.
"Oh, he would make a very poor soldier," was the Welsh farmer's verdict. "Very reserved man; very reserved indeed!"
Ivor smiled again as the lamb upon which he had been operating dropped the last of his heavy coat upon the sheet and, shaven, shorn, and freed at last, scrambled out into the adjoining shed.
The shepherd seized another struggling and woolly one, downed him into his place, and took up the shearing-knife once more.
"Now," he said in Welsh, with a little nod to me, and I continued to work the wheel.
Mr. Price in his oilskin coat had stepped out again into the rain. Colonel Fielding did not go with him. He unfastened his brown, trench-worn mackintosh, threw it on one of the big wool-sacks, and took a pace nearer to me and my wheel.
I wondered if he had expected to see Elizabeth in the shed. Taking absolutely no notice of him I worked on.
"Let me have a turn, won't you?" came the meek voice of the intruder—for I felt, as I never had with Captain Holiday, that an intruder he was. "You take a rest, Miss Matthews."
"Thank you, I am not in the least tired." I said it coldly. I thoroughly disapproved of this young man who had been trifling with Elizabeth's feelings.
Elizabeth, bless her, was too good to be at the mercy of this young scamp with his D.S.O. and his subtle way of flirting so that you could hardly nail it down and say that it was flirting at all. Elizabeth had said hard things of Harry, in the days of my infatuation for him. But she hadn't thought any harder things of him than I thought now of this slender-waisted ruffian with the moustache that looked as if a pinch of light-gold paint had been rubbed on to his upper lip.
Cruel hard lines that he should turn out to be the one and only exception to Elizabeth's rule of hating men!
In his meekest of voices he said:
"Perhaps you are not tired. But why are you so—er—poisonously angry with me?"
Before I could reply he answered, still meekly, his own question.
"You loathe me because you think I've been heartlessly flirting with your little friend."
I stared!
He smiled deprecatingly.
"Oh, yes!" he continued, "women think it takes a woman to spot those things. But—er—I knew. Now I'll tell you—er—something."
He glanced towards that "reserved" man, the shepherd.
"No English, eh?" he broke off. "I wish no servants knew any! By Jove, how it would simplify life for a lot of people——"
"But what did you want to tell me?" I said crossly.
"Just this," replied Colonel Fielding, with his most deceptive, most shrinking bashfulness. "I'm going to marry your little friend, Miss Weare."
"To marry Miss Weare?"
You can imagine how I stared afresh at this. In fact, I stopped turning the wheel.
Deftly taking the handle from me, Colonel Fielding began turning it in my place rhythmically, easily. I stood there beside him, watching him blankly.
I remembered Elizabeth's forlorn mood of last night. I went back to her, as I'd seen her this morning, turning to the kitchen, where she was to help Mrs. Price bake. Her small face under its thick crop had been set with the determination to let work drive away trouble. For trouble, I knew, had been as heavy at her heart as it was at my own. Then was all that altered already?
"What!" I exclaimed. "You've seen her this morning?"
His eyes under their long lashes did not leave the turning-wheel. He only said gently:
"No, I haven't seen her this morning."
"But——" I exclaimed. I knew he could not have seen her last night after we got back to camp.
"You haven't even asked her yet?" I said.
"No," he agreed. "I haven't asked her yet." And he went on turning that big red wheel as if he were a Fate in khaki. After half a dozen turns he added, "But I am going to marry her, for all that."
Rebukefully I said, "You mean you're going to marry her if she'll have you?"
"She will have me," he said gently, but firmly. He blushed a little, but the girlish blushes that this young man went in for never seemed to make the faintest difference to his cheek—in another sense. "She'll have me. I know that."
"How do you know that?" I retorted, sitting there on that sack, and hardly knowing whether I were more glad on Elizabeth's account, or more indignant or more puzzled by this young man of hers.
He answered: "I know, because I know the—er—the kind of man I am myself." ... Here he looked up, shyly, from that wheel, and said, "Miss Matthews, you think I'm—er—the last word in fatuous conceit."
I was thinking so. How could I help it after what he had just said?
"Er—I'd hate you to think that. You are her pal. I—er—owe you an explanation. Please forgive me if I talk to you for a bit just about myself——"
I put in "That's a thing all men do."
"Yes. But—er—all men don't ask you to forgive them first, do they?" he said very quickly. "Generally they yarn on and on and on, imagining a woman must be jolly interested to hear it. They don't realize that the woman (unless she happens to be wildly in love with them), the woman's—er—mostly thinking of something miles away all the time!"
I couldn't help smiling. To hear a man himself say such a thing! It sounded more like something Elizabeth herself might give out.
He said, "You have forgiven me? Well, I'll tell you why I know Miss Weare will have me. If she were not attracted enough for that, I should not be attracted. You see I am talking—er—quite frankly; no camouflage at all. Unless a girl liked me, I shouldn't begin to seek her. Not after the first look. I must be liked," he said very simply and with that blush, but very definitely, "I must feel that I am wanted."
He seemed to me extraordinary, from what I knew of men. I said, "But, Colonel Fielding, men always prefer a girl who doesn't seem to want to have anything to say to them! They say men want the chase!"
"I can't help a lot of the silly conventional things people say," he declared blandly. "Er—I suppose those things are true enough about people who are all alike, like a flock of sheep." Here he nodded towards the lamb which had just sprung out of Ivor's hands, and had made off to join his shorn brethren. "But I say—er—what I feel myself."
I looked at him doubtfully, the graceful creature whom I personally could not admire.
He said, "It wouldn't amuse me to try to make—er—love to anybody unless I felt that it would amuse them too, and—er—delight them!"
I objected, "But that's a woman's point of view."
"Why only a woman's?" asked the young soldier mildly, turning his wheel. "I learnt it from my mother. The woman's view! I find it useful to look at—er—Love and the like. 'Two things greater than all things are, the first is Love and the next is War.' The average man has made good on War, these last four years. But—er—I don't listen to him much on Love."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't think the average man makes a success of it," declared this puzzling creature coolly. "Give a kid of two a violin to play; what? I think he (the average man) could learn plenty from the average woman—on that one subject. It's with her my sympathies are, Miss Matthews.... Of course I talk too much.... And now you'll call me effeminate."
His face wore a mask of harmless politeness with a gleam behind his lashes as I looked at him. Effeminate? With that striped ribbon on his breast, with his colonelcy at twenty-six, with all the praise and devotion of his men? These things are not won by effeminates.
He was a man all right, even if he did say and think things which we imagine are exclusively feminine. He was a puzzling exception. And even if he were the kind of man whom I could never have loved I was beginning to like him.
Without replying to his remark about effeminacy, I smiled and got up.
"Let me take a turn," I said.
I took the handle of the wheel from him and began to work. He sat down on the wool-sack that I had left. And even as we changed places something else changed between us.
He realized it, as I did.
"We shall be friends now," he said very quickly and gently.
"Yes," I nodded.
"They say—your dear 'They'!—that there's no such thing as Platonic friendship. Here's the one exception," he told me. "Where all the Love goes elsewhere. You know you think I'm utterly unattractive. But you want to listen to me. As a matter of fact, you'll never talk to afiancé, Miss Matthews, as freely as you'll talk to me."
"Never," I agreed.
"Nor shall I ever jaw like this, to Elizabeth." ... He broke off and said affectionately, "You're such a pal to her!"
"She is to me."
"I know," he said. "I knew it before I saw you two girls. It spoke out of her letters to me from the flat. You know, when I got her letters, I—er—wanted to see her!"
"They were mostly about the kitchen sink," I said, laughing.
"Yes, that's what she told me when I told her she put herself into her letters," said the man whom we had called "the old Colonel" in those days. "Somehow I made up my mind that this girl I'd never seen would be different from—er—most girls. I came down here, you know, to look. And then—when I caught sight of her by that cart in the field—looking such a little picture!—I could have caught her up then and there!"
"I wonder you weren't discouraged; she was chilling enough that morning!"
"No," he denied. "I felt she didn't mean that. That was just the first minute when she had realized I was that distasteful creature a man, and yet that she didn't dislike the look of me."
"Ah! She's told you she hates men."
"Yes, we've had all that," he admitted, "and I explained to her that I ought to understand, because, as a rule, I don't like girls."
Here I lifted my head and looked severely at this humbug.
"You? Not like girls!" I exclaimed.
"Not usually," he persisted, smiling at me. "I think they're too little."
"Little? But you are in love with Elizabeth. And Elizabeth's tiny!"
"Elizabeth," he repeated, and I heard him give a little laugh of delight over the name of the beloved. "Elizabeth has a heart as big as the earth! I was—er—talking of hearts, natures, minds. So often girls make me feel their minds are rather narrow," confessed this odd type of woman-hater.
"Petty, you know," he went on. "Saying—er—things about other women—oh, brrrr! Spiteful to their own sex. Then being decent and jolly enough with—er—us.Thatputs me off; by Jove, nothing worse! I can say all this to you, Miss Matthews. You're different; like her. But lots of girls make me feel they—they—— Well, not enough cold tub!" he wound up ingenuously, "and too much face-powder!"
The last words brought a certain image into my mind; exquisitely-dressed, scented, powdered Muriel!
Thinking of yesterday, I said to the young man, "You're very severe on girls, but I saw you when you were flirting outrageously with one—no, not with Elizabeth. With Miss Elvey."
"To see if it annoyed Elizabeth!" he admitted, so frankly that I had to laugh over my work.
I said: "Now that was feminine enough! That was 'little'! Anybody would have imagined that you were very much attracted. In fact, I thought you were."