The lady had met Collingwood three or four times before, and had treated him with scant courtesy, because he had been an enlisted man. But when she heard that he was married, and that his wife was aboard ship, her curiosity got the better of her exclusiveness—that and her eagerness to hear the sound of her own voice, for there were few Americans in Cuyo, and she was already on bad terms with several families. She threw a gushing condescension into her manner of greeting Charlotte, which put that young woman’s nerves on edge at once. But Mrs. Snodgrass (“What a name!” thought Charlotte, “I never expected to meet it out of books!”) was determined to make the best of the conversational opportunity. After a somewhat ingenuous scrutiny, she invited the Collingwoods to dinner. Charlotte was about to decline, when Martin interrupted and said that their being delayed an hour or so was of no importance; that it was evidently going to be a clear night, and they had time enough to make the run over before dawn. Charlotte supposed that some affection for Lieutenant Snodgrass—who had been a captain of volunteers in the war, and Martin’s officer—was the cause of her husband’s eagerness, and she accepted the invitation at once. She went ashore with the Lieutenant’s wife, while Martin remained to see to a few last details, and to make some arrangements with Maclaughlin.
Lieutenant and Mrs. Snodgrass (he had not been able to secure entrance to the regular army with his volunteer rank) were comfortably domiciled, and the meal was a good one, though Charlotte was made uncomfortable by the hostess’s repeated apologies both for her food and her service. “The servants are such impossible creatures here, don’t you think?” fluttered the little woman who, before her marriage, had been a stenographer working for twelve dollars a week, and who had never enjoyed the luxury of a servant in her life till she came to the Philippines.
Charlotte glanced at her in surprise. “I had not thought so,” she replied. “They need a great deal of training, of course, but I fancied them ideal servants, so truly of the servant class, believing that God ordained us to be masters, and them to serve. At home, I feel that servants do not acquiesce in the situation, and the more intelligent they are, the more sensitive I am to the undercurrent.”
It was evident that Mrs. Snodgrass regarded this remark as verbiage. “How funny!” she said. “I never felt that way.”
“In other words,” remarked Lieutenant Snodgrass, who was a self-made man, but who was taking on his army training with great quickness, “Mrs. Collingwood prefers an aristocratic social system to a democratic one.”
“I suppose so,” Charlotte assented, “though theoretically I stand for democracy like all good Americans. You inferred a condition of my mind of which I was hardly conscious myself. But I suppose you are right.”
“Do you hear that, Collingwood? You are the most rabid democrat I know. Are you going to bring your wife over to your way of thinking?”
Martin was staring at Charlotte, who began to color with embarrassment. Her view-point had seemed to her so natural and so simple that she was quite unprepared for the comment it evoked.
“I’ll have to coach you up before I turn you loose on people,” he said. “Why, I never thought it of you.”
Lieutenant Snodgrass assumed the air of a man, the length of whose matrimonial experience justifies him in extensive allusions to feminine peculiarities.