And the sight which had struck me was that of the face over the heavy fur collar of the man who was sitting in that taxi; bloated and coarse, he carried his sixty years as though he had not in all that time known one hour of strenuous exercise or of clean joy in the open. Over-eating (more disgustful in its effects than heavy drinking) was stamped on his face from the bags beneath his eyes to his lowest chin. A dead thing he seemed to me; dead more truly than any of the lads who had flung their happy lives away for the cause of the world while he and his like "lived." Through the square of the window I caught above his shoulder a glimpse of a girl's pretty and pettish profile...
The crowd surged in between us and the taxi before I could exclaim "Muriel! ... I say, it was Muriel; did you see her?"
My tall young husband turned his head as it towered above us. "No! Muriel with him? I thought I saw old What's-his-name; I s'pose he's taken her out to celebrate on his steel-profits——"
For since Harvest-time Muriel Elvey had been twice engaged; for a month to Harry, an engagement quickly broken after she and her mother had been to stay at the house of this distant connection, the elderly profiteer of whom I had caught that glimpse. She was to marry him. Elizabeth and I thought it the most horrible thing we had ever heard of. But Dick had only shrugged his shoulders and Colonel Fielding had declared it was an excellent arrangement and that the ... er ... Mystery-Girl would consider she was in for a very good time.
"A good time!" Oh, misused phrase! To me it has come to represent one image; the memory of a fleshy and stubby-fingered male hand resting on a taxi-door, holding a fat black cigar and wearing a diamond that spat out coloured lights, less sparkling than the dewdrops that stud the Welsh bracken at home.
We were all going home again in a couple of days; the Land was home to us for ever now; a very little of Town would do for all of us these days, and we, fit and joyous from air and work and elemental interests, had a "good tune" which we never even called such.
"Isn't it odd," I remarked as we struggled back towards the Circus again, "that Harry Markham didn't seem to mind about Muriel so much, after all?"
"No," said Elizabeth's Colonel, succinctly. "He had a month of her. I bet he's ... er ... jolly glad of the change to that topping little Driver-girl he's all over the place with now——"
"'Go it, Mother Browne!'" whooped the youngest of the dancing warriors, a Captain with three wound-stripes and a cheeky peach face which no German bullet would ever now spoil. "Come on!"
"Here, what's this, what's this——" broke in my Dick. "What are you doing, you people——"