on like
that."

"Nark you, Stoner!" Bill answered. "It mayn't be fair, but it'd be
nice if I got one."

"Kiss a face like yours," muttered Mervin, "she'd have a taste for
queer things if she did."

"There's no accountin' for tastes, you know," said Bill. "Oh, Blimey,
that's done it," he cried, stooping low as a shell exploded overhead,
and drove a number of bullets into the roof. The old woman raised her
head for a moment and crossed herself, then she continued her (p. 073)
work; the daughter looked at Bill, laughed, and punched him on the
shoulder. In the action there was a certain contempt, and Bill forthwith
relapsed into silence and troubled the girl no further. When we got
out to our work again he spoke.

"She was a fine hefty wench," he said, "I'm tip over toes in love with
her."

"She's not one that I'd fancy," said Stoner.

"Her finger nails are so blunt," mumbled Pryor, "I never could stand a
woman with blunt finger nails."

"What is your ideal of a perfect woman, Pryor?" I asked.

"There is no perfect woman," was his answer, "none that comes up to my
ideal of beauty. Has she a fair brow? It's merely a space for
wrinkles. Are her eyes bright? What years of horror when you watch
them grow watery and weak with age. Are her teeth pearly white? The
toothache grips them and wears them down to black and yellow stumps.
Is her body graceful, her waist slender, her figure upright. She
becomes a mother, and every line of her person is distorted, she
becomes a nightmare to you. Ah, perfect woman! They could not (p. 074)
fashion you in Eden! When I think of a woman washing herself! Ugh!
Your divinity washes the dust from her hair and particles of boiled
beef from between her teeth! Think of it, Horatio!"

"Nark it, you fool," said Bill, lifting a fag end from the bottom of
the trench and lighting it at mine. "Blimey, you're balmy as nineteen
maggots!"

It was a few days after this incident that, in the course of a talk
with Stoner, the subject of trenches cropped up.

"There are trenches and trenches," he remarked, as we were cutting
poppies from the parapet and flinging the flowers to the superior
slope. "There are some as I almost like, some as I don't like, and
some so bad that I almost ran away from them."

For myself I dislike the narrow trench, the one in which the left side
keeps fraying the cloth of your sleeve, and the right side strives to
open furrows in your hand. You get a surfeit o