He talked one day of going on active service. How would it affect them if he had to do so? It was a necessary part of a soldier’s lot.
“But I should come too!” she said. “I should come with you.”
“It might not be altogether convenient,” he said, for already he had learnt that Madeleine Philips usually travelled with quite a large number of trunks and considerable impressiveness.
“Of course,” she said, “it would be splendid! How could I let you go alone. You would be the great general and I should be with you always.”
“Not always very comfortable,” he suggested.
“Silly boy!—I shouldn’t mind that! How little you know me! Any hardship!”
“A woman—if she isn’t a nurse—”
“I should come dressed as a man. I would be your groom....”
He tried to think of her dressed as a man, but nothing on earth could get his imagination any further than a vision of her dressed as a Principal Boy. She was so delightfully and valiantly not virile; her hair would have flowed, her body would have moved, a richly fluent femininity—visible through any disguise.