“Just the same.”
“Although they are south of the Bay and Pompey north of it? Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
“I believe,” said Driss, “that if you could drop the Fleet into the middle of County Carlow it would bring its own atmosphere with it.”
“That’s what I mean,” Mr. Alter exclaimed, pulling out a pipe. “Its own atmosphere—it has a definite atmosphere of its own, enveloping it, hiding it from outsiders. And the atmosphere they breathe changes naval officers only so long as they breathe it. Once outside it—once in the train from Portsmouth to London, for instance—they are so much like the ordinary civilian that he fails to recognize them as visitors from another world. He notices something a little strange about them—something he can’t define, something that, in nine cases out of ten, he dismisses with the catchword ‘breezy.’”
“Breezy!” groaned Elstone. “Don’t we look breezy?”
“No, you don’t—not here and now, because you are within the atmosphere, though my presence disturbs it somewhat, I dare say. But if you went ashore to-night, outside Portsmouth, away from naval people—what then?”
“Ask Krame. He is the poodle-faker.”
“Poodle-faker?”
“A payer of polite calls,” Howdray explained. “A balancer of teacups. An opener of doors. An eater of small morsels. A maker of small talk—in short, a specialist in drawing-room duties.”
“But poodle-faking is quite different,” said Krame.