"I'm afraid Jack hadn't thought of that. He hadn't visualized his wife and baby dwelling in a Turkish town, cut off by thousands of miles of ocean from home. He had been so preoccupied with the divine prospect of 'a job ashore' that he had forgotten the environment. And we had been to Saloniki with coal, time and again. I can't say I blamed her. Residence in southeastern Europe has its drawbacks for a housewife. And quite apart from a natural repugnance to dirt, Mrs. Evans had an unnatural repugnance to anything foreign. She never really left England. She took it with her. She carried with her into her husband's cabin, and along the wild oriental foliage and architecture of Alexandrian streets, the prim and narrow ideals of her native valley. It never occurred to her that those people in turbans and fezzes were human. It never occurred to her when a French or Italian girl passed, dressed with the dainty and charming smartness of her race, that she might possibly be virtuous as well. She shrivelled at their very proximity, drawing the angelic Babs from their contamination. She was uneasy, and would continue to be uneasy, until she was safe at home once more in Threxford, England. That was the burden of her unuttered longing: to get home, to get home, back to the little semi-detached red-brick villa on the Portsmouth Road, which her father had given her for a wedding present and which fifty Macedoines would never induce her to sell. "For that is what it would mean if Jack invested even two hundred pounds in this wonderful enterprise to develop Macedonia. He had spent several hundred in furnishing the house, and since then most of his two hundred a year had gone in expenses, for he was no niggard either with himself or those he loved. Neither wife nor chick of his should ever lack for anything, he had told me proudly. If a neighbour's child got some expensive and useless contraption to pull about, Babs had one, too, the very next week. If a neighbour's wife got a fur coat, Mrs. Evans had orders to go and do likewise, a more expensive one if possible. What little he had was on deposit in the bank in his wife's name, so that she could draw on it while he was away. "And so I came round to the unpleasant conviction that while Mrs. Evans was silently awaiting my repudiation of the whole thing, her husband was expecting me to use my eloquence to persuade his wife to let him invest. They say a bachelor has no worries of his own. Which is as well, when his married friends endeavour to make him responsible for their own follies, and use him as a cushion to soften the family collisions. I was an old hand and slipped out. And I really was not thinking so much of my own two hundred pounds salted down in Home Rails, as of Jack's home, when I said, cheerfully: