Toby looked puzzled. "Well, what's there to tell?" he questioned. "A ship's a ship. You wouldn't understand if I was to tell you I'd seen a schooner, or a barque, or a cattle-boat, or a dinghy." He was rather lofty. "I mean, you wouldn't know."
"How do you know, then? How can you tell the difference?" she persisted.
Toby laughed at the fact that she had not recognised how he had slipped in the dinghy among recognisable ships. He had supposed everybody knew what a dinghy was. He pointed that fact out to Sally, who could not see that she had betrayed such glaring foolishness. Pressed to confine himself to comparable vessels, Toby condescendingly resumed:
"It's a question of the size, and the rig.... All that." He was elaborately the expert, sure that an amateur could never understand. Sally might have retorted with baffling words about seams and camisoles and voile; but she was shrewd in mystic silence. "You'd have to see the ships.... Then I could point it all out to you. I mean, a gunboat or a cruiser or a trawler.... What I mean, they're different. See a big liner going out from Liverpool: I tell you, it's a sight. Flocks of people, and the old thing moving along like grease. Leaves you standing. At first you don't half feel a fool. But on a boat like ours there's no time to look about. We're under-manned. That's what it is. Not enough of us to make it light for everybody. Ought to be altered. Got to be doing chores the whole time. Swabbing down, cooking——"
"Can you cook?" Sally was swift, arch, incredulous.
Toby grinned. Then he remembered her classes—her "cooking" classes—and his aunt's message, and grew suddenly serious.
"Look here, Sally. That cooking. I don't like them other fellows," he said. "I mean to say, meeting them at classes, and walking home, and that."
Sally held his arm tightly. A look of scorn appeared upon her face. In her heart a feeling arose of impatience and amused enjoyment of his concern about a thing that was to her so trivial compared with her love for himself.
"You going to begin that again?" she demanded. "Silly. Here, put your face down. There! D'you think I don't love you. Think I don't believe you're worth ten of those others? Well, I do. And that's enough of that."
Toby was obstinate. He wanted her to be his property. Nevertheless, his tone was milder.