I smiled, looking at the piece of tropical cookery he called white, but let him run on.
“Do you know,” he said, “there was Powell’s wife, and poor Jack Dennis’s widow, and the adjutant’s sister; and, by Gad, except for a _dahi_ that Powell kept (Powell’s wife was never strong), there wasn’t another woman, Butterfield, in the whole damned station! And Winifred Dennis didn’t amount to much. But here----”
He never seemed to get accustomed to it. Had a London fog stamped the metropolitan complexion indelibly and universally black, Coke would have given a sigh, as knowing that his glimpse was too good to have lasted, and returned to his old order of things. The rustle of a silk skirt was an unstaled wonder to him; and the contrast between what he called the “real European baby-ribbon sort of thing” and the “infernal blouse and puggaree business” never failed to entertain him.
With Miss Dixon he was soon on good terms, but with most other ladies, Mrs. Loring Chatterton first of all, his diffidence was marked. His chivalrous devotion was Quixotic, but most of them would have bartered it, I am sure, for a more work-a-day and less punctilious style of attention. Mrs. Loring, indeed, said so.
“I don’t know where he got his style of conversation from,” she remarked, “but he is absolutely embarrassed when I present him to a woman. How do you account for it, Mr. Butterfield?”
“It is not,” I replied, “that he is deficient in physical bravery. I can only account for it on the supposition of instinct. He knows your propensities, Mrs. Loring, and would possibly die as he has lived, a blameless bachelor.”
“But it’s just the same with the married women,” she returned. “What is there to be afraid of in Alice Carmichael?”
“I decline to be invidious, Mrs. Loring,” I replied. “He gets along well enough with Millicent Dixon.”
“They are related,” she replied, somewhat inconclusively.
“I am afraid it is a _non sequitur_,” I answered. “Friendship generally varies inversely as the square of the distance of the relationship.”
“I wonder what we could do?” she said, half to herself. “Do you think Mrs. Gervase would do him any good?”
The wicked, wedded creature! Emily Gervase, a youthful widow, was Cicely Vicars’s sister. I drew myself up with dignity.