“Yessum, that’s the raht tahm.”
“Great heavens!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mamise sat up, drew the comforters about her back, and breakfasted with speed. She dressed with all the agility she could muster.
She regretted the bath. She missed it, and so must we all. In modern history, as in modern fiction, it is not nice in the least for the heroine––even such a dubious heroine as Mamise––to have a bathless day. As for heroes, in the polite chronicles they get at least two baths a day: one heroic cold shower in the morning and one hot tub in the late afternoon before getting into the faultless evening attire. This does not apply to heroes of Russian masterpieces, of course, for they never bathe. (“Why should they,” my wife puts in, “since they’re going to commit suicide, anyway?”)
But the horrors of the Great War included this atrocity, 265 that the very politest people came to know the old-fashioned luxury of an extra-dry life. There was a time when cleanliness was accounted as ungodliness and the Christian saints anathematized the bath as an Oriental pollution. During our war of wars there was a vast amount of helpless holy living.
Exquisite gentlemen kept to their clothes for weeks at a time and grew rancid and lousy among the rats that were foul enough to share their stinking dens with them. If these gentlemen were wounded, perchance, they added stale blood, putrefaction, and offal to their abominable fetor.
And women who had been pretty and soapy and without smell, and who had once blanched with shame at the least maculation, lived with these slovenly men and vermin and dead horses and old dead soldiers and shared their glorious loathsomeness.
The world acquired a strong stomach, and Mamise’s one skip-bath day must be endured. If the indecency ever occurred again it will be left unmentioned. Heaven knows that even this morning she looked pure enough when she was dressed.
Mamise found that Polly was still in bed, giving her damaged ankle as an excuse. She stuck it out for Mamise’s inspection, and Mamise pretended to be appalled at the bruise she could almost see.