DONE. Virtuous Gandy! If I had three thousand a month, paid from England, I don't think I'd deal with a shroff either.
MACKESY. (Yawning.) Oh, it's a sweet life! I wonder whether matrimony would make it sweeter.
CURTISS. Ask Cockley—with his wife dying by inches!
BLAYNE. Go home and get a fool of a girl to come out to—what is it Thackeray says?-“the splendid palace of an Indian pro-consul.”
DOONE. Which reminds me. My quarters leak like a sieve. I had fever last night from sleeping in a swamp. And the worst of it is, one can't do anything to a roof till the Rains are over.
CURTISS. What's wrong with you? You haven't eighty rotting Tommies to take into a running stream.
DONE. No: but I'm mixed boils and bad language. I'm a regular Job all over my body. It's sheer poverty of blood, and I don't see any chance of getting richer—either way.
BLAYNE. Can't you take leave? DONE. That's the pull you Army men have over us. Ten days are nothing in your sight. I'm so important that Government can't find a substitute if I go away. Ye-es, I'd like to be Gandy, whoever his wife may be.
CURTISS. You've passed the turn of life that Mackesy was speaking of.
DONE. Indeed I have, but I never yet had the brutality to ask a woman to share my life out here.