I really am a shocking sailor, though ’the Gidger’[#]—my small daughter—loves the sea. The stewardess was an angel of light to me, yet she insisted on my turning out for all the boat drills. I felt I would so much rather lie in my berth than bother about my place in a boat if we were torpedoed, that it would be so much less exertion to go down comfortably in the big ship than toss about in a small boat on the chance of being saved. One great advantage of _mal de mer_ is that all other sensations are obliterated. I was not conscious of the least fear when the ship next to ours went down, and the fact that our own escaped a like fate by a miracle left me cold. Even my loneliness and misery at my first parting from Michael since our marriage were all forgotten—swallowed up in one great desire to lie down flat and perhaps take a little iced champagne, ’for my stomach’s sake,’ like poor darling Timothy. [#] _Re_ the nick-name Gidger, the first ’G’ is pronounced as in Gideon and the second ’g’ as in German. Over four whole years of life I’ve ’drawn a veil,’ and, oh, so much has happened since I finished the last chapter. I’ve got to know my husband, that’s one thing. A woman never really knows a man when first she marries him. That old woman in our village used to say ’the longer you live with a man, the less you like him,’ and she ought to know, she was ’thrice widowed.’ So I have discovered that mine is a very quaint person, with primitive, old-world ideas, that make him ruthless with himself and other people about ’work’ and ’duty’; and because he never had a sister (and a mother only for an hour), he’s rather apt to think any woman who powders her nose is of necessity a painted Jezebel! Shall I ever forget his face on the steamer going out to India, when one of those dear, delicious, natural, American women produced a small mirror and a powder puff in the social hall and said to her friend,— ’Say, Sadie, why didn’t you tell me I’d got a nose like a headlight?’ And his expression! when I told him that _of course_ I had the same things in my pocket. Why, good gracious, is there any woman who doesn’t powder her nose, though I do agree with him that some of them put it on thicker than they need. Then, too, he can, and will, only talk upon subjects he understands. Imagine the devastating dullness of a life lived on those lines. But now. he says ’two in a family can’t talk, there aren’t enough words to go round.’ So my black beast (as I call him), has been content to adore and bully me by turns, and fill his life with deeds, and leave the words for other people and his wife. Consequently, I am not perfectly positive yet how much less I like him. One day, after the war had raged two years in France, he came and told me that he was ordered to the Front, and I could see the soldier and the lover struggling in his face. ’Oh, Meg, I’m going, so I shan’t miss it after all, but how _can_ I leave you?’