CHAPTER II
She found an early opportunity to carry on her investigations. For, at dinner that night, she found herself, Tietjens having gone to the telephone with a lance-corporal, opposite what she took to be a small tradesman, with fresh-coloured cheeks, and a great, grey, forward-sprouting moustache, in a uniform so creased that the creases resembled the veins of a leaf. . . . A very trustworthy small tradesman: the grocer from round the corner whom, sometimes, you allow to supply you with paraffin. . . . He was saying to her:
"If, ma'am, you multiply two-thousand nine hundred and something by ten you arrive at twenty-nine thousand odd. . . . "
And she had exclaimed:
"You really mean that my husband, Captain Tietjens, spent yesterday afternoon in examining twenty-nine thousand toe-nails. . . . And two thousand nine hundred toothbrushes. . . . "
"I told him," her interlocutor answered with deep seriousness, "that these being Colonial troops it was not so necessary to examine their toothbrushes. . . . Imperial troops will use the brush they clean their buttons with for their teeth so as to have a clean toothbrush to show the medical officer. . . . "
"It sounds," she said with a little shudder, "as if you were all schoolboys playing a game. . . . And you say my husband really occupies his mind with such things. . . . "
Second-Lieutenant Cowley, dreadfully conscious
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