Page:Solo (1924).pdf/150

 wary of half-crowns, for they were deceitfully like florins.

Then the speech of these people! They said "thruppnse" for threepence, "frock" for dress, and "gaing" for going. They called ice-cream "hokey-pokey" and served it in little cups made of biscuit. The newsvenders sold queer papers like Ally Sloper's Half Holiday and Tid-Bits and when they spoke of "home" they meant England! And such an odd way of pronouncing "home"—as though there were at least two vowels in the middle and no h to speak of!

And Miss Green, who arranged entertainments at the Seamen's Institute, Miss Green who was about thirty and rather thin, Miss Green with whom he might quite easily have fallen in love, had he not already fallen in love with Miss Dolly Castles, the star of that quite too delicious Pinafore—to say nothing of Phœbe Meddar, whose image he kept "polishing up so faithfully"infaithfully" in [sic] his heart—Miss Green lived in what she called an "upstairs 'ouse!" Most houses here hadn't any upstairs! And Miss Green had never seen snow! But she had been in a part of the north-west where it was so hot you couldn't put your hand on a cat's back—and Paul had asked if the cat burnt her tongue when she tried to lick herself!

There was something quaint about it all, and something heart-catching. Probably it was merely the thought that you might have to turn your back on everything and go home, just when you had set foot on the edge of experience!

The evening at the theatre had been dazzling and faultless. Hazel Kirke was tame compared with Dick Deadeye and Hebe and Josephine and the sisters and cousins and aunts in their pink dresses—no, frocks. "And I polished up the handles so faithfully, that now I'm the Ruler of the Queen's Navee—" That was him, Paul Minas! And the lilt of it! If Gritty could only have been along!