‘We give her mutton broth very often, but seldom stock soup,’ said Aunt Emma. ‘Mamma thinks it is too stimulating.’
‘Indeed?’ said I, to all of it.
They took me up to see her in her crib, and pointed out, as she lay asleep, that though she had ‘a general look’ of me, her features were distinctively Farnham.
‘Won’t you kiss her?’ asked Alice. ‘You haven’t kissed her yet, and she is used to so much affection.’
‘I don’t think I could take such an advantage of her,’ I said.
They looked at each other, and Mrs. Farnham said that I was plainly worn out. I mustn’t sit up to prayers.
If I had been given anything like reasonable time I might have made a fight for it, but four weeks—it took a month each way in those days—was too absurdly little; I could do nothing. But I would not stay at mamma’s. It was more than I would ask of myself, that daily disappointment under the mask of gratified discovery, for long.
I spent an approving, unnatural week, in my farcical character, bridling my resentment and hiding my mortification with pretty phrases; and then I went up to town and drowned my sorrows in the summer sales. I took John with me. I may have been Cecily’s mother in theory, but I was John’s wife in fact.
We went back to the frontier, and the regiment saw a lot of service. That meant medals and fun for my husband, but economy and anxiety for me, though I managed to be allowed as close to the firing line as any woman.
Once the Colonel’s wife and I, sitting in Fort Samila, actually heard the rifles of a punitive expedition cracking on the other side of the river—that was a bad moment. My man came in after fifteen hours’ fighting, and went sound asleep, sitting before his food with his knife and fork in his hands. But service makes heavy demands besides those on your wife’s nerves. We had saved two thousand rupees, I remember, against another run home, and it all went like powder, in the Mirzai expedition; and the run home diminished to a month in a boarding-house in the hills.