Except, they weren’t. They moved easily through the crowd, laughing and joking with the men, while Emmie stood in the back, feeling awkward and not quite sure what to do with herself. She had never been good at mixed social occasions, always too aware of her height, her protruding teeth, her fade-away lashes, all those things that made her, in a word, plain. She didn’t have that facility for flirting that seemed to come naturally to Maud. With boys she’d known forever, she could be comfortable, but it was different with strangers. Aunt May had always been quite clear: there was only one reason any man would approach Emmie. Not her face, but her fortune.
Emmie was just considering, not very enthusiastically, the prospect of circulating around the room with her tray of cigarettes, when a soldier detached himself from a group and came up to her.
“Cigarette?” Emmie said brightly as a tall, thin man in a well-worn uniform approached.
“Do you think I deserve one?” asked a clipped, patrician voice.
Emmie’s head snapped up. She was staring at a lean, tanned face, less haggard now than the last time she had seen it, but unmistakably the same. “You’re the man from the hospital.”
“I would understand if you would rather disavow the acquaintance.” With an effort, he added, “I saw you here—and saw my chance to make good on my bad behavior of the other day. To put it bluntly, I owe you an apology.”
He’d had a bath since she’d last seen him. Emmie could smell sandalwood soap, which made a rather nice contrast to some of the other smells in the room. He’d also shaved, but the mustache was still there, a thin dark line over his upper lip.
She probably shouldn’t be staring at his lips, Emmie realized, and hastily began rearranging her tray of cigarettes. “There’s no need for that. It wasn’t your fault we were blocking Dr. Blake’s office. I imagine it must be pretty maddening to be looking for someone and find three prone women instead. Are you sure I can’t interest you in a cigarette?”
“Only one of you was prone. And it was my fault that I . . . took out my ill temper on you and your friend.” There was something about his voice that demanded her attention. She could see the muscles in his throat work as he searched for the right words. “I was visiting a friend in the hospital. A man who ought to be at Oxford now, staring at bugs through a microscope and marveling at the miracle of wings, not blind in both eyes, staggering about on one leg.”
She knew men like that. The US hadn’t entered the war until the spring, but there had been Yale men who had felt strongly about protecting France any way they could, who had volunteered at the first word of war back in 1914, some in the air, some in the volunteer ambulance service, some in the French Foreign Legion. She could think of at least one cousin who ought to have been in New Haven right now, writing about the foreign policy of some long-ago King Louis, not buried in a graveyard somewhere in France.
But she couldn’t explain all that, so she said only, “It’s a horrible waste, isn’t it?”
The Englishman looked down at her, and she knew he wasn’t really seeing her at all. “We thought we’d blaze over here in a moment of glory, see off the Hun, and go home. We thought it was something like a holiday. And then to see you—more of you—going off, as we did . . .”
“Not in a blaze of glory, though,” said Emmie. At the farewell luncheon, a poem had been read to them, comparing them to the heroes of the old sagas, now reborn in female form. It had been lovely and terribly inspiring, but even at the time, Emmie had rather doubted its applicability. “We’re not looking for glory. Just to do something decent and worthwhile.”
“Does that still exist in the world?”
“I should hope so. I think so. I don’t know that we’ll accomplish anything particularly heroic, but if we get milk to even a handful of children, that’s something, isn’t it? At least, it is to those children.”
His dark eyes were fixed on her face, almost alarming in their intensity. At last he said, “Yes. It is.”
It would have been nice to think he meant it. Emmie set her tray down on a table. “You think we’re very naive, don’t you?”
He reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette case, his eyes never leaving hers. He drew it out, a silver one with a monogram on it. “Would you rather I called it idealistic?”
“I’d rather honesty than flattery.” It was, she supposed, one of the benefits of being plain. One learned early on to discern flummery. She laughed at herself, her eyes crinkling. “You needn’t sugarcoat it. Sugar’s been rationed, and we’ve had our quota already.”