But for the prospect of sheer want confronting them they would have been quite happy. The bond that united them was based on mutual respect as well as affection. Disappointment and privation only cemented it. In these days when the stale breakfast egg was a comestible to be shared, when anything better than canned food became a luxury, their friendship remained free from any of the pettinesses which generally characterize the intimacy of people living under conditions of hardship.
The stoicism of a family of soldiers supported Alexandra. She had the pride of race that refuses to surrender to misfortune. Her grit, astonishing in one so delicately reared, surprised Maggy. She began to look up to Alexandra as a being of a superior world in which the virtues, being Anglo-Indian, were of a particularly high order. She had a very nebulous conception of the meaning of the term.
Just as Alexandra found it absorbing to listen to Maggy's stage talk, even though it was humorously misogynistic, so nothing pleased Maggy so much as to listen to Alexandra's narration of life in an Indian military station. It sounded to her like a history of the high gods: a medley of color, warmth and ease, good living and brass bands. She loved to hear of parades and polo, of the troops of servants, the gymkhanas and dances, all the social amusements and advantages of the sahib caste. From habit, Alexandra would use native words when talking of these things, and Maggy's unaccustomed brain never quite differentiated between syce, hazari, maidan, ayah, chit, durzi, kitmagar, butti, tikka-gari and such-like terms in common use with Anglo-Indians. But they impressed her immensely.
The amount of talk they got through in these early days of their friendship was stupendous. It helped to relieve the harassing search after employment and its invariable ill-success.
One morning, three weeks after their first meeting, Maggy sprang out of bed to gather up two letters which their landlady had pushed under the door. On the flaps were inspiring words in red lettering.
"Pall Mall Theater! Hooroo! One for each of us!" she cried, and danced about in her nightdress.
Alexandra, behind an improvised screen formed of a shawl over the towel rail, was having her morning bath in a zinc tub of inadequate size.
"Open mine," she called. "I'm wet."
She waited anxiously. There came the sound of tearing paper and then Maggy's voice, raised excitedly:
"Pull that old shawl down, Lexie! If you don't practise on me you'll die of shyness and no clothes at the Pall Mall. We're engaged! Rehearsal Thursday. Eleven o'clock!"