A cooing voice says, ‘Do you not?’
‘Are you at it again!’
She knows that it must be now or never. She has left her biggest guns for the end. In her excitement she is rising up and down on her toes.
‘Kenneth, I’ve heard that the thing a man on leave longs for more than anything else is a bed with sheets, and a bath.’
‘You never heard anything truer.’
‘Go into that pantry, Kenneth Dowey, and lift the dresser-top, and tell me what you see.’
He goes. There is an awful stillness. He returns, impressed.
‘It’s a kind of a bath!’
‘You could do yourself there pretty, half at a time.’
‘Me?’