“When two have set their minds on each other, a hundred cannot keep them apart.”—English Proverb.
The confidence of two young married women is amongst the most interesting experiences to be obtained; but it is about as easy to get at by an outsider as a Masonic ceremony of initiation. For a time they are bound to skirmish over the surface of facts, and compare notes on their households. From this they may advance to their husbands, but it is not till they reach Themselves and their own point of view that they are really instructive. Had Mrs. Ritchie Stern been remaining in Key Island, it is possible that she and Mrs. Lewin might have reached that stage when a broken sentence conveys more to the sympathetic hearer than a whole explanatory treatise would do to one who had not the key to such mysteries. But the hours she spent at the bungalow were too contracted for this; only the stress of their mutual circumstances could have made them get as far as stage number two, for they did talk of their husbands.
“I am glad Alaric has gone with Captain Stern,” Leoline said frankly, because she had something to conceal in her piteous knowledge of Ally. “It makes the journey at least so much less tedious. And I hope they will be pals—that is my husband’s inevitable word, so you must excuse it.”
“It is so much more expressive than friends, or even chums,” said Mrs. Ritchie pensively. “To ‘pal’ always suggests a comfortable arm-in-arm state of intimacy, eh?”
“Exactly! Ally makes friends rather easily.” The last words were almost abrupt.
“I don’t think Ritchie is so good at that as at listening. If you know what I mean, other men make friends with him, and he listens. I should think Captain Lewin was always very popular.”
“Invariably. I cannot remember, on looking back through my life, any single person who knew Ally and disliked him.”
“It is rather a fatal gift at times,—if you do not mind my saying so.”
Chum did not answer directly. She spoke with a touch of unintentional wistfulness. “Captain Stern gave me a sense of such innate control. He is like one of those Biblical examples that are greater by reason of ruling themselves than the noisier men who take cities. It always struck me as such a very sane ideal.... I hope he will be a friend of Ally’s!”
Mrs. Ritchie looked at her with the full bounty of her nature, and her words were not so irrelevant as they seemed.