He nodded, taking out his cigar-case and offering me a cigar. When I declined it he took one himself, bit off the end, lighted it, and in general carried himself as if my approaching confidences wouldn't matter much. I resented this the less, knowing it to be his attitude toward every one and everything. All that I cared for was that he should be in a position to give a correct account to Violet, in case she insisted on hearing his report before seeing me.
"You remember how I came to go over and join the American Ambulance Corps in France?"
He said he did not remember it.
"Well, I didn't do it of my own accord. I—I loathed the idea. If we'd been in the war at the time of course I should have done anything I could; but we were not in the war. As a matter of fact, if Vio had only let me wait I could have been of more use in my own particular line."
"You mean what we used to call the old-woman line."
"If you choose to put it that way."
"Didn't you put it in that way yourself?"
"As a feeble joke, yes. But we'll let that pass. All I mean is that as head of the Department of Textiles in the Museum of Fine Arts I knew a lot of a subject that became of great importance when we went into the war; so that, if Vio had waited—"
"Vio," he grinned, "was like a bunch of other women who'd caught the fever of sacrifice, what? When all their swell lady friends in England and France were giving up their dear ones, they didn't want not to be in the swim. Don't think I didn't go through it, old chap. Vio was simply crazy to give up a dear one. Before she'd got you she'd been after me. When Hilda Swain drove her two sons into being stokers in the navy, and killed one of them with the unaccustomed work, I thought Vio would go off her chump with a sense of her uselessness to a great cause. Those were days when to be Vio's dear one meant to go in danger of your life."
A hundred memories crowded in on me.