Godfrey, wise in his generation, laughed at the jeremiads of these callow laudatores temporis acti, and on probing further, satisfied himself that everything was still for the best in the best of all possible armies. He also found that ginger was still hot in the mouths of these friends of his, and that he had not lived until he had seen Betty or Kitty or Elsie So-and-So, or such and such a Revue.
Frankly and boyishly, his appreciated his friends’ entertaining chatter. But they came and went, with the superficial bonhomie of the modern soldier. They touched no depths. If he had died of his gangrened foot, they would have said “Poor old chap!” and thought no more about him. He did not condemn them, for he himself had said and thought the same of many a comrade who had gone West. It was part of the game which he played as scrupulously and as callously as the others. He craved, however, solicitude deeper and more permanent.
Of course there was Dorothy Mackworth. She did not come to Churton Towers; but she had dutifully attended the Carlton when he had summoned her thither to meet Sister Baring, and put on for his benefit her most adorable clothing and behaviour. The lunch had been a meal of delight. The young man glowed over his guests—the two prettiest women, so he declared, in the room. Marcelle in the much-admired hat, her cheeks slightly flushed and her eyes bright, looked absurdly young. The girl, conscious of angelic dealing, carried off her own absurd youth with a conquering air that bewitched him more than ever. She dropped golden words:
“Oh, let us cut out Leopold! I’ve no use for him.”
She had no use for Leopold Doon, his half-brother and rival. He was to be cut out of their happy thoughts. Also:
“I’m not going to have you creep back into civil life and bury yourself at Cambridge. You’d get a hump there you’d never recover from. There’s lots of jobs on the staff for a brainy fellow like him, aren’t there, Miss Baring? I’ll press father’s button and he’ll do the rest.”
Now Dorothy’s father was a Major-General doing things at Whitehall, whose nature was indicated by mystic capital letters after his name.
“You’ll look splendid in red tabs,” she added.
This profession of interest and this air of proprietorship enraptured him. Under the ban of her displeasure Cambridge faded into a dreary, tumbledown desolation. She had but to touch him with her fairy wand and he would break out all over in red tabs. She spoke with assurance in the future tense.
And again, in a low voice, on their winding way out through the tables of the restaurant, Marcelle preceding them by a yard or two: