"You are a great traveler, aren't you, Mr. Deprayne?" she suggested when the silence had begun to be oppressive.
I had always been accounted a talkative man. One could read in her face that she had the wit to sparkle in conversation like champagne in cut glass, yet under the constraint that had settled over us, we labored as platitudinously as a knickerbockered boy and a school-girl entertaining her first caller.
"I have traveled a little," I answered.
"And encountered unusual adventures?"
"No—just traveled."
"Billy says," she went on as graciously as though I had not rebuffed every conversational advance, "that you were shipwrecked in the south seas and wounded by savages."
"Billy!" My bruised consciousness flinched under the familiarity of the title and I fell back upon shameless churlishness.