CAPT. G. A man has a right to live his life as happily as he can. You aren't married. CAPT. M. No--praise be to Providence and the one or two women who have had the good sense to jawab me. CAPT. G. Then you don't know what it is to go into your own room and see your wife's head on the pillow, and when everything else is safe and the house shut up for the night, to wonder whether the roof-beams won't give and kill her. CAPT. M. (Aside.) Revelations first and second! (Aloud.) So-o! I knew a man who got squiffy at our Mess once and confided to me that he never helped his wife on to her horse without praying that she'd break her neck before she came back. All husbands aren't alike, you see. CAPT. G. What on earth has that to do with my case? The man must ha' been mad, or his wife as bad as they make 'em. CAPT. M. (Aside.) 'No fault of yours if either weren't all you say. You've forgotten the time when you were insane about the Herriott woman. You always were a good hand at forgetting. (Aloud.) Not more mad than men who go to the other extreme. Be reasonable, Gaddy. Your roof-beams are sound enough. CAPT. G. That was only a way of speaking. I've been uneasy and worried about the Wife ever since that awful business three years ago--when--I nearly lost her. Can you wonder? CAPT. M. Oh, a shell never falls twice in the same place. You've paid your toll to misfortune--why should your Wife be picked out more than anybody else's? CAPT. G. I can talk just as reasonably as you can, but you don't understand--you don't understand. And then there's The Butcha. Deuce knows where the Ayah takes him to sit in the evening! He has a bit of a cough. Haven't you noticed it? CAPT. M. Bosh! The Brigadier's jumping out of his skin with pure condition. He's got a muzzle like a rose-leaf and the chest of a two-year-old. What's demoralized you? CAPT. G. Funk. That's the long and the short of it. Funk! CAPT. M. But what is there to funk? CAPT. G. Everything. It's ghastly. CAPT. M. Ah! I see. You don't want to fight, And by Jingo when we do, You've got the kid, you've got the Wife, You've got the money, too. That's about the case, eh? CAPT. G. I suppose that's it. But it's not br myself. It's because of them. At least I think it is. CAPT. M. Are you sure? Looking at the matter in a cold-blooded light, the Wife is provided for even if you were wiped out tonight. She has an ancestral home to go to, money and the Brigadier to carry on the illustrious name. CAPT. G. Then it is for myself or because they are part of me. You don't see it. My life's so good, so pleasant, as it is, that I want to make it quite safe. Can't you understand? CAPT. M. Perfectly. “Shelter-pit for the Off'cer's charger,” as they say in the Line.