She was not a young woman, and from her complexion and the hardness of her thickly built figure she might have been made of wood.
She wore a short, strapped-in skirt, leather leggings, and a fawn-colored sweater. Her eyes were a sharp, decided blue, and the rest of her appearance matched the sweater.
Winn pulled himself together.
“I don’t see, Madam,” he remarked slowly, but with extreme aggressiveness, “what the devil my actions have to do with you!”
“No,” said the lady, grimly, “I don’t suppose from the exhibition I’ve just been watching, that you’re in the habit of seeing farther than to the end of your own nose. However, I may as well point out to you that if you had killed yourself, as you richly deserved, and as you came within an ace of doing, the run would have been stopped for the season. We should all have been deprived of the Grand National, and I, who come up here solely to ride the Cresta, which I have done regularly every winter for twenty years, would have had my favorite occupation snatched from me at an age when I could least afford to miss it.”
“I haven’t been killed, and I had not the slightest intention of being so,” Winn informed her with dangerous calm. “I merely wished to ride the Cresta for the first time unobserved. Apparently I have failed in my intention. If so, it is my misfortune and not my fault.” He took out a cigarette, and lit it with a steady hand, and turned his eyes away from her. He expected her to go away, but, to his surprise, she spoke again.
“My name,” she said, “is Marley. What is yours?”
“Staines,” Winn replied with even greater brevity. He had to give her his name, but he meant it to be his last concession.
“Ah,” she said thoughtfully, “that accounts for it. You’re the image of Sir Peter, and you seem to have inherited not only his features, but his manners. I needn’t, perhaps, inform you that the latter were uniformly bad. I knew your father when I was a girl. He was stationed in Hong-Kong at the time and he was good enough to call me the little Chinese, no doubt in reference to my complexion. Plain as I am now, I was a great deal plainer as a girl, though I dare say you wouldn’t think it.”
Winn made no comment upon this doubtful statement; he merely grunted. His private opinion was that ladies of any age should not ride the Cresta, and that ladies old enough to have known his father at Hong-Kong should not toboggan at all.