"Claire makes the most gorgeous apple dumplings!" said Marion on one of these occasions.
"Apple dumplings? Ye-es," replied Haig judiciously. "But what about plain dumplings in chicken gravy?"
"Still, Philip, if I had my choice it wouldn't be chicken at all."
"Potatoes. Big, baked potatoes, split open, you know, with butter and salt and paprika."
"And salad--lettuce and tomatoes and oil and vinegar."
"And jam. I do love jam spread on toast."
"I'll tell you something," said Haig recklessly. "I could even eat sauerkraut!"
Their worst craving was for salt. Marion could fairly taste the spray of the Atlantic on the bathing beaches. She dreamt of salt,--barrels of salt and oceans of salt and caves she had read of in which salt hung in glittering stalactites. And Haig too. He described a desert where salt had risen to the surface and gleamed in crystals in the sand. And once he had lived a long time on salt pork, which he had thought the most insufferable food. But now! The taste of it came back to him, and went tingling through every nerve.
To free their minds from such tormenting memories, Haig went deep into his adventures, his wanderings, his search for excitements. He told her of strange lands and peoples, of the beautiful spots of the world, of battles and perils and escapes,--everything he had been through, with one exception. That--the story of Paris--was still a closed book to her. And similarly, there was one chapter of her life that she did not open to him. A certain delicacy, rendered more vital by their very situation, in which few delicacies could be maintained, restrained them from the uttermost self-revelation. The one subject that was not touched upon in the most intimate of their conversations was that dearest to Marion's heart and most incomprehensible to Haig's reason. Partly this avoidance was intuitive, and partly deliberate; where there was so much suffering that could not be escaped, they were scrupulous to inflict upon each other no unnecessary pain or embarrassment. Between a more common man and a less fastidious woman, placed in such propinquity, there would almost inevitably have been concessions and compromises but between these two there remained a barrier that might have been passed by Marion's unquestioning love, but never by Haig's inclinations, curbed as they had been through many years, and still reined in by his distrust.