“No,” said Ally, who had other impressions of ward-rooms, “very much the other way.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that,” said Chum vaguely. “Only I feel that I have been listening to a sermon in the open air—and I have grown so unused to the open air that I am afraid of catching a moral cold. Ally, how dreadfully confined we grow in garrisons! Mrs. Stern brings the sea winds to you in her eyes.”
“You are not growing poetical, are you, Chum?” said Ally suspiciously. “I thought Stern a very decent chap—can’t imagine him preaching.”
“He couldn’t!” said Chum, dropping to the old level of his thought, and abandoning her own. “But I preached myself the sermon on him as the text, and it was, ‘Woe unto them who can see their own wives, for they shall not see any one else’s!’ What lovely emeralds Mrs. Stern was wearing, by the way.”
“Yes, I wish I could give you some more stones. I’ll try, if we get to Malta.”
“I would rather have nice clothes than jewels,” said Chum. “A dowdy woman with diamonds is worse dressed than a chic one with paste, all the world over. And we can’t run to both—even at Malta.”
“Did you like Mrs. Stern?”
“Yes!” said Chum, her eyes darkening to the shadows on purple velvet. “And I hope I shall not meet her again.”
She said the last words savagely, under her breath. They were her echo to Mrs. Stern’s, that still hurt her, and made her afraid of the eyes that divined her secret mind.
“It is so short-sighted of women to stake their little all on a man who is not safe to be no farther off than the next room!”