“My idea,” I said, “would be to get another girl, not necessarily like the photo, but the same type, appealing and pathetic and all that. He’d probably take to her after a time.”
“I suggested that,” said Daintree, “but my wife simply won’t hear of it. She says the story as it stands is a great romance and that it would be utterly spoiled if Simcox switched off after another girl. I can’t see that, can you?”
“In a case like this,” I said, “when the original girl wasn’t a girl at all——”
“Exactly,” said Daintree, “but when I say that my wife brings up the Angel in the Shell Hole part of the story and says that a great romance is its own reward.”
“I don’t know what to advise,” I said.
“I didn’t think you would,” said Daintree, “though my wife insisted that you’d be able to suggest something. But you can tell me what you think of the story. That’s what I really want to get out of you. Is it a Sob Story or just a rather unusual spoof?”
“That,” I said, “depends entirely whether you look at it from Simcox’ point of view or Pat Singleton’s.”
VIII ~~ SIR GALAHAD
The order, long expected and eagerly desired, came at last. The battalion moved out from dusty and crowded barracks to a camp in the wilderness. Lieutenant Dalton, a cheerful boy who had been taught Holy Scripture in his childhood, wrote to his mother that the new camp was “Somewhere in the wilderness beyond Jordan between the river of Egypt and the great sea.” This description of the situation was so entirely inaccurate that the Censor allowed it to pass without complaint. Old Mrs. Dalton told her friends that her son was living under the shadow of Mount Sinai. He was, in fact, nowhere near either Jordan or Sinai. He was some miles east of the Suez Canal. For a week or so officers and men rejoiced in their new quarters. There was plenty of elbow room; no more of the overcrowding they had suffered since they landed. They had, indeed, miles of totally unoccupied desert at their disposal. Each tent might have stood in its own private grounds, three acres or so in extent, if that had not been felt by the colonel to be an inconvenient arrangement. There was also—and this particularly pleased the battalion—the prospect of a fight with the Turks. Everyone believed when the move was made that a battle was imminent, and the battalion, which had no experience of fighting, was most anxious to show what it could do.