Mr. Wrenn meekly followed into the hall. Bill Wrenn was nowhere in sight.
Now it chanced that Adjutant Crabbenthwaite told much of Houssas and the N'Gombi, of saraweks and week-long treks, but Mr. Wrenn's imagination was not for a second drawn to Africa, nor did he even glance at the sun-bonneted Salvationist women packed in the hall. He was going over and over the Adjutant's denunciations of the Englishmen and Englishwomen who flirt on the mail-boats.
Suppose it had been himself and his madness over Istra--at the moment he quite called it madness--that the Adjutant had denounced!
A Salvationist near by was staring at him most accusingly....
He walked away from the jubilee reflectively. He ate his dinner with a grave courtesy toward the food and the waiter. He was positively courtly to his fork. For he was just reformed. He was going to "steer clear" of mad artist women--of all but nice good girls whom you could marry. He remembered the Adjutant's thundered words: "Flirting you call it--flirting! Look into your hearts. God Himself hath looked into them and found flirtation the gateway to hell. And I tell you that these army officers and the bedizened women, with their wine and cigarettes, with their devil's calling-cards and their jewels, with their hell-lighted talk of the sacrilegious follies of socialism and art and horse-racing, O my brothers, it was all but a cloak for looking upon one another to lust after one another. Rotten is this empire, and shall fall when our soldiers seek flirtation instead of kneeling in prayer like the iron men of Cromwell."
Istra.... Card-playing.... Talk of socialism and art. Mr. Wrenn felt very guilty. Istra.... Smoking and drinking wine.... But his moral reflections brought the picture of Istra the more clearly before him--the persuasive warmth of her perfect fingers; the curve of her backward-bent throat as she talked in her melodious voice of all the beautiful things made by the wise hands of great men.
He dashed out of the restaurant. No matter what happened, good or bad, he had to see her. While he was climbing to the upper deck of a bus he was trying to invent an excuse for seeing her.... Of course one couldn't "go and call on ladies in their rooms without havin' some special excuse; they would think that was awful fresh."
He left the bus midway, at the sign of a periodical shop, and purchased a Blackwood's and a Nineteenth Century. Morton had told him these were the chief English "highbrow magazines."
He carried them to his room, rubbed his thumb in the lampblack on the gas-fixture, and smeared the magazine covers, then cut the leaves and ruffled the margins to make the magazines look dog-eared with much reading; not because he wanted to appear to have read them, but because he felt that Istra would not permit him to buy things just for her.