“Oh, Martin, I hate ‘Mrs. C.’ It sounds like Dickens.”
“Do you mean the dickens?”
“No: if it comes to that, I’ll use the other word—the one you are so fond of using.”
Mr. Collingwood almost sat up. “Say, you’re coming on,” he ejaculated. “You’d never have said that when we were first married.”
“That’s true.” Mrs. Collingwood’s tone left open an inference which her husband must have perceived, for he laughed contentedly.
“You were mealy-mouthed,” he stated, with a genial retrospect in his voice.
Charlotte looked at him demurely. “I was brought up to observe the conventional limitations of feminine speech, dear; but if your heart is set upon my enlarging upon them—”
“Heaven forbid!” Martin ejaculated piously, as she came to her suggestive little pause. He added after a moment, “But I had a girl once that used to swear. It never sounded bad in her. It was just funny and cute.”
If there was one habit of Martin Collingwood’s that came near rousing a visible resentment in his wife, it was his easy-going references to his “girls.” She knew that the term, as he used it, implied no disrespect, that it was his equivalent for innamorata, and that each affair with a girl had represented one of his tentative ventures toward matrimony. She was not jealous of her predecessors in his affections, for there was an overwhelming sincerity in his invariable reassurance that none of them “came up to specifications”; that is, conformed to his ideal of womanhood, as she herself did. Nor did he hesitate to reveal that, in most cases, the breaking of sentimental ties was largely the result of his own initiative. If his frankness in these revelations had contained one element of personal vanity, it would have strained dangerously his wife’s respect for him. But although he had a happy self-confidence, Collingwood was utterly without self-conscious vanity. Charlotte realized, also, that his good looks and his personal charm which she, with her critically developed faculties, had been unable to withstand, must have made him an exceedingly popular swain with the type of young woman whom he had previously affected. But it was irritating to have him lump her with them so carelessly. It implied that, though she was the only perfect jewel according to his taste, the matter was, after all, one of taste and not of kind. She was human enough, however, to suffer some pangs of curiosity concerning her erstwhile rivals, and though she would not have asked a question, she was not dissatisfied when Martin went on:
“It’s funny what differences there are in people. You are not glum, but you don’t laugh much. Even when you seem happiest, you are rather grave and quiet. But that girl giggled from morning till night, and she made me laugh too. She saw the funny side of everything that happened, and she was no fool either. She was quick as a flash. The last time I saw her was at the close of the Spanish War. It was about ten days before I enlisted. The Government sent a gunboat up the Mississippi River just to show the backwoods people what a real live gunboat that had been in the war looked like; and those blamed officers were making love to every pretty girl on both banks of the river wherever the boat lay long enough to have a reception for the officers or a smoker for the men. This girl was dancing with a sandy-haired little ensign, and he was piling it on thick as molasses on a hot cake. All of a sudden, she began to giggle. He wanted to know why. “I’ll bet a horse you’re married,” she said over his shoulder; and the fellow, like to split himself laughing, vowed he wasn’t. But when he got to St. Louis, there it was in the papers, how his wife had come out to join him for that week. When his boat went back down the river the next week, all the girls gave him the laugh. That little devil had told it on him, and all the talk he had given her.”