"Oh! The man-snatcher! She took my Harry. Now she's annexed Captain Holiday. She takes everybody!"
"I promised him I'd come down with mother and play the piano for his soldiers and things at some priceless concert or other that he's giving," Muriel Elvey went on. "His big place down here is turned into a hospital, you know. That is," with a glance at my muddy boots and uniform, "I don't suppose you've met him, of course, but he's——"
"What, Captain Holiday?" Vic broke in, unaddressed and heartily. "Not met the gent what's giving the concert? Met him? Huh! I should shay sho!"
Muriel, with an indescribable stiffening of her pretty, well-turned-out figure, stared up at the big Cockney Land Girl who thus accosted her.
Vic leaned against the counter, beaming. She might have stood for the symbolical figure of Young Democracy, gazing tolerantly down upon costly Convention.
"All us girls'll be turning up at Captain Holiday's concert," Vic told her. "It's going to be some beano, I give you my word. So you're going to oblige, too, are you? See you then!" She gave a little nod, and turned to the chemist who had been listening with the concentration of a male gossip to every syllable of this conversation.
"Now, Mr. Lloyd! What about this shampoo powder we've heard so much about? ... What's in that box, there, to the right? ... There we are! Egg and lemon—and very nice, too. Sixpence? Right! Good-bye-e-e-e!"
Vic marshalled us out of the shop with a friendly grin divided between the chemist and Muriel Elvey, who was left standing there—utterly pole-axed, I am sure by this glimpse of the sort of companionship into which one was launched when one joined the Land Army.
I could see that she found Vic "too impossible for words!"
This hurt me for my messmate and pal, though I am convinced Vic knew little and cared less about the fact that she had just been looked upon as a young female hooligan! I tramped back along the "puddlesome" roads to camp in a state of mind that I had not known since I'd shaken the dust of London off my feet in the spring.