"'What do you think, Mrs. Evans?' I asked, taking the bull by the horns. 'Shall we gamble a hundred or so and get rich quick?'
"'You're not married,' she replied, without looking up. 'You can spare it I dare say. It is different for Jack. He hasn't any money to throw away.'
"'Well,' I said, 'I haven't any to throw away, either, I can assure you. I wouldn't go to sea if I had. But Jack thinks this is a great opportunity to invest his money where he can look after it. You see, he'll be drawing a salary as well when he's ashore in Saloniki.'
"Still she didn't look up. She had not budged an inch from her conviction that I agreed with her.
"'I couldn't think of living abroad,' she said, severely. 'I have Babs to consider.'
"I'm afraid Jack hadn't thought of that. He hadn't visualized his wife and baby dwelling in a Turkish town, cut off by thousands of miles of ocean from home. He had been so preoccupied with the divine prospect of 'a job ashore' that he had forgotten the environment. And we had been to Saloniki with coal, time and again. I can't say I blamed her. Residence in southeastern Europe has its drawbacks for a housewife. And quite apart from a natural repugnance to dirt, Mrs. Evans had an unnatural repugnance to anything foreign. She never really left England. She took it with her. She carried with her into her husband's cabin, and along the wild oriental foliage and architecture of Alexandrian streets, the prim and narrow ideals of her native valley. It never occurred to her that those people in turbans and fezzes were human. It never occurred to her when a French or Italian girl passed, dressed with the dainty and charming smartness of her race, that she might possibly be virtuous as well. She shrivelled at their very proximity, drawing the angelic Babs from their contamination. She was uneasy, and would continue to be uneasy, until she was safe at home once more in Threxford, England. That was the burden of her unuttered longing: to get home, to get home, back to the little semi-detached red-brick villa on the Portsmouth Road, which her father had given her for a wedding present and which fifty Macedoines would never induce her to sell.
"For that is what it would mean if Jack invested even two hundred pounds in this wonderful enterprise to develop Macedonia. He had spent several hundred in furnishing the house, and since then most of his two hundred a year had gone in expenses, for he was no niggard either with himself or those he loved. Neither wife nor chick of his should ever lack for anything, he had told me proudly. If a neighbour's child got some expensive and useless contraption to pull about, Babs had one, too, the very next week. If a neighbour's wife got a fur coat, Mrs. Evans had orders to go and do likewise, a more expensive one if possible. What little he had was on deposit in the bank in his wife's name, so that she could draw on it while he was away.