“Yes.”
“Do you think it’s quite correct to be sitting in a strange man’s room?”
“Perfectly.”
“Tramp!” he said.
“Vagrant!” she replied.
She rose, and stood awhile gazing out of the open window—a mysterious figure, looking like old gold in the light of the reading-lamp, set against the sheen of the moon.
“It’s a wonderful night,” he remarked. “You have no idea what it means to me to feel cool and comfortable. The desert up-country is the very devil in summer.”
“Yes,” she replied, turning to him, “one can understand why Cleopatra and her Ptolemy ancestors left the old cities of the south, and built their palaces here beside the sea.”
He smiled, knowingly. “If she had lived up there in Thebes where the old Pharaohs sweated, there wouldn’t have been any affair with Antony. She would have been too busy taking cold baths and whisking the flies away. But down here—why, the sound of the sea in the night would have been enough by itself to do the trick.”