"Then you do enjoy a little vinegar?" volunteered Yate, with eyes that declared her all honey.
"No, it's too crude; but I like spice—just a pinch or two to leaven appreciation."
Mrs Silver at this moment loomed expansively in the distance. Harry leapt up to join her, and only the acacia leaves above were eavesdroppers to the rest of the conversation. It flowed evenly, sometimes stopping against an impedimental stone of argument—occasionally gushing with iridescent bubbles from the force of energetic collision. Yate was a serious thinker and a confident talker. Carol had by nature that light quality of intellectual exuberance which, ornamental and active as foam, has no kinship with real erudition. They were speaking of Yate's career, the first steps, the coveted Victoria Cross, the laurels, and a warm blush underlay the bronze of the young soldier's cheek.
"A year ago," she said, "I was rampant with your ambition, now I cannot forget that the rungs of a soldier's ladder are made of dead men."
"What are a few lives compared with a country's greatness?"
"Only a subtraction from a multiplicity of mourners whom death rejects, the numberless babes bereft, the women starved of love."
"Surely love were a petty consideration, a paralysis to the hand of——"
"Don't you remember what Byron says?" she uttered, her glance fastening itself on the floating mists of sunset, "'Love is of man's life a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence.' If war costs him his life, it takes her whole existence too!"
"Yes, but—but—" stammered Yate, fighting with a wave of sentimentality deeper than any to which he had been accustomed, "women nowadays don't love in that way."
"The more fools they if they do," she answered, flippantly, coming abruptly from the clouds, and flicking at a gnat with the stem of her fan. "Have some tea, it is iced and flavoured with lemon peel, a la Russe."