Page:Mary Rinehart - More Tish .djvu/171

 Rh  "And when I remember how nearly your lack of control cost us our lives, when you insisted on sneezing"

"Insisted! If you had been in a shell hole full of water up to your neck, Tish Carberry"

"The difference between you and me, Aggie," Tish replied calmly, "is that I should not have been in a shell hole full of water up to my neck." The war was over then, of course, but there was still a disturbed condition in certain countries, and Tish's eyes grew reflective.

"I see they are thinking of sending a real army into Russia," she said thoughtfully. "I suppose that Russian laundress of the Ostermaiers' could teach a body to talk enough to get about with."

Shortly after that Aggie disappeared, and I found her later on in Tish's bathroom crying into a Turkish towel.

"I won't go, Lizzie," she said, "and that's flat! I've done my share, and if Tish Carberry thinks I am going to go through the rest of my life falling into shell holes and being potted at by all sort of strange men she can just think again. Besides that, I have been true to the memory of one man for a good many years, and I simply refuse to be kissed by any more of those immoral foreigners."

Aggie had in her youth been betrothed to a