"Wait!" I threatened her again. "Wait until some great huge ultra-masculine man comes along and begins to bully you in a voice like a typhoon!"
"Like a what?"
"Like a gale! Like a Bull of Basan! That sort of huge brute who'd terrify the life out of you, Elizabeth my child, and order you about like Petruchio and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew! That's what'll happen! I shall simply love to watch you being absolutely subjugated"—
"Book early, to avoid disappointment," mocked my chum.
"—subjugated by a gigantic, navvy sort of person with muscles as big as vegetable-marrows bobbling all over his arms and shoulders!"
"It sounds too fascinating, doesn't it?" jeered the girl whose head reached up to my ear. "I love your prognostications, Joan, especially after a hard day's work! It puts you in train! You really think a bully-ragging Prize-fighter-type will be my Fate!"
"Unless——" Here I had another idea. "Unless you ever meet the one and only man in this world that you've ever written letters to. What about that old Colonel of yours?" I laughed.
A word of explanation here.
"The Old Colonel" had been for a year a standing joke in our London ménage. He was the officer whose furnished flat we had taken over by the week in Golder's Green—and which we'd now left for such very different quarters. His flat was full of neat contrivances, such as the bath-mat, hand-made out of rounds of bottle corks; full, too, of books on "Tactics," all annotated in a neat, old-maidish hand.
We had amused ourselves by making a mental picture of their owner—a methodical, fussy, white-moustached "old" soldier. This had seemed all of a piece, too, with the Colonel's letters; for he and Elizabeth had exchanged much formal correspondence on the subjects of the kitchen chimney and of the tabby-cat he pensioned.