"You know you were! All about Woman being the Plaything of Man!"
"Don't rub it in," he entreated, with another glance down at this plaything so maddeningly near, yet not, perhaps, for him. Yes! If she had had the boldness of the kitten who strikes with soft paws at the Force which could annihilate her, he had the boding patience of that big dog who waits, sitting up, with the lump of sugar on his nose.
It was she who kept him so.... She was—oh, she was getting her own back now!
She broke off as if by the way, to ask him, "Let me see, what was the first thing—almost the first I ever heard you say.... What sort of a judge of women are you?"
It is not true that the Scot is inevitably without a sense of humour. At that moment Fergus Ross saw even the joke against himself, since he thought it would appeal to her. He responded, "What was that about women? Something I've hairred in a drim?"
Relentless, Olwen repeated her demand. "What sort of a judge of women are you?"
He looked at her, threw up and shook his head with the action of a boxer who drops his hands as well.
"I guess I'm about as fine a judge of women as a baby is a judge of mothers," he told her, frankly and ruefully. "One he knows; his own. And herrrr he's got to have!"
But she put it aside. This wasn't enough of a proposal! She harked back to that party at Mrs. Cartwright's which had witnessed the last losing fight of this prisoner of hers, taken now with horse, foot and guns.
"'What's Love? An amusement,'" she quoted, mischievously, his words upon that occasion. "That's what you said, four—no! only three days ago," she insisted, now feeling that she had got well into her stride and could keep this well-merited strafing of the young man for an hour yet. "Yes! Just to be horrid to me! How you talked! All about how bored a man got 'when some woman started in to Love' him——"