Patty, fresh and tidy as a rose, sat near by and did the honours of the breakfast tray.
“You see,” she said, absent-mindedly piling sugar into Helen’s cup, “I’ve decided to be sensible about this thing. I’m not going to——”
“You’re going to get a Food Controller after you if you are so lavish with that sugar! For Heaven’s sake, Patty, stop! That’s the third spoonful!”
“Is it? I wasn’t looking. As I say, I’m going to be sensible about Little Billee’s going away. He’s got to go, and so I may as well make up my mind to it.”
“Sensible, indeed! Yet it doesn’t seem to me such a marvellous triumph of intellect or such a phenomenal force of will that brings about that resolve!”
“In one more minute I shall throw a pillow at you, Bumble! I guess if you were engaged to the biggest man in the world, you wouldn’t let him walk off to war——”
“He’s going with the whole
Of his patriotic soul,
At the call of his country’s flag!”
sang Helen, trilling the refrain of a song they had all sung the night before.