They sat inept for a time, thinking aimlessly, seeing nothing, hearing only the bated breath of the night wind groping stealthily through the tree-tops, and from far beneath, the still, small voice of a brook feeling its way down its unlighted stairs.
At last her voice murmured, “Are you quite too horribly uncomfortable for words?”
His voice was a deep-toned bell somehow articulate: “I couldn’t be more comfortable except for one thing. I’m all out of cigars.”
“Oh!” He had a vague sense of her mental struggle before she spoke again, timidly:
“I fancy you don’t smoke cigarettes?”
“When I can’t get cigars; any tobacco is better than none.”
Another blank of troubled silence, then, “I wonder if you’d say that of mine.”
Her voice was both defiant and trepidate. He laughed. “I’ll guarantee to.”
A few years before he would have accepted a woman’s confession that she smoked cigarettes as a confession of complete abandonment to all the other vices. A few years farther back, indeed, and he would have said that any man who smoked cigarettes was worthless. Since then he had seen so many burly heroes and so many unimpeachable ladies smoke them that he had almost forgotten his old prejudice. In some of the United States it was then against the law for men (not to say women and children) to sell or give away or even to possess cigarettes. After the war crusades would start against all forms of tobacco, and at least one clergyman would call every man who smoked cigarettes a “drug-addict.” It is impossible for anybody to be moral enough not to be immoral to somebody.