“But is it true what he says, Theodore?” She appealed to Gumbril.
“I should think so.” Gumbril’s answer was rather dim and remote. He was straining to hear the talk of Bruin’s canaille, and Mrs. Viveash’s question seemed a little irrelevant.
“I used to do cartin’ jobs,” the man with the teacup was saying. “’Ad a van and a nold pony of me own. And didn’t do so badly neither. The only trouble was me lifting furniture and ’eavy weights about the place. Because I ’ad malaria out in India, in the war....”
“Nor even—you compel me to violate the laws of modesty—nor even,” Mrs. Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking huskily, expiringly, “of legs?”
A spring of blasphemy was touched in Coleman’s brain. “Neither delighteth He in any man’s legs,” he shouted, and with an extravagant show of affection he embraced Zoe, who caught hold of his hand and bit it.
“It comes back on you when you get tired like, malaria does.” The man’s face was sallow and there was an air of peculiar listlessness and hopelessness about his misery. “It comes back on you, and then you go down with fever and you’re as weak as a child.”
Shearwater shook his head.
“Nor even of the heart?” Mrs. Viveash lifted her eyebrows. “Ah, now the inevitable word has been pronounced, the real subject of every conversation has appeared on the scene. Love, Mr. Shearwater!”
“But as I says,” recapitulated the man with the teacup, “we didn’t do so badly after all. We ’ad nothing to complain about. ’Ad we, Florrie?”
The black bundle made an affirmative movement with its upper extremity.