“And if ever so be that Sir John hies him to the Indies, sure you would be set on going too?”
Jack was not so quick in response as Molly expected. Would he, or would he not? He could not feel quite sure either way. Wherever Sir John might be, there no doubt Jack would wish to be also; yet it lay within the limits of possibility that he might still more strongly desire to be somewhere else. India in those days lay very far distant. Miles are miles in these days as in those, but actual distance is greatly diminished. A man writing from India to his friends in England may now look for a reply in six or seven weeks; but then he could not look for a reply in less than as many months.
Jack felt that such a separation from people at home—from Molly in particular—would be serious. He had not thus far gauged his state of mind critically. He was not in love with anybody; he had no particular wish to marry anybody—so he would have said. Jack still counted himself exclusively in love with his profession. He looked upon Molly as his particular friend—as the being beyond all others upon whose interest and sympathy he might most surely rely. She was not his sister—he quite scouted that notion—neither was he her lover. They were simply friends—bons camarades in the more modern phraseology. Where Molly happened to be, there Jack gravitated as naturally as a stone gravitates earthward; and whatever Jack had in his mind, that he told to Molly as naturally as water pours out of a tilted jug. He cared a good deal for Molly’s opinion. If Molly disapproved of aught that he did, he was discomfited; and if Molly put anyone before himself, he was conscious of jealous sensations. That was about all.
It seemed to him this evening that Molly was looking particularly nice and ladylike—or, in the language of the day, “pleasing and genteel.” She was not pretty; Jack would have said that he did not wish her to be pretty. He liked her better as she was. But she was not without her own measure of attractiveness.
“Of course you would wish it,” Molly added decisively. “In your place I would do so. And if—if I could be a soldier, Jack, I would feel as you do. I would wish to go where Sir John goes. ’Tis a thousand pities I am a girl and cannot be a soldier.”
“You would wish to go to the Indies, if I were to stay at home?”
Molly smiled at the conceit, as it seemed to her.
“’Tis vastly more likely that you may be the one to go and I to be the stay-at-home.” She did not speak as if it were in any sense a distressing question, though as a secondary consideration she remarked placidly, “And I should miss you, Jack.”
“As much as ever you profess to miss Roy?”
Molly laughed outright this time.