"Very likely," said Franklin.
Beatrix sat back and put up a smiling face. "How old are you?" she asked.
"Does that matter?"
"Oh, yes. I think so. I'm trying to piece you together like one of those picture puzzles that children and septuagenarians play with. It seems to me that you must have spent a certain number of years among the black races. When you speak I seem to hear the distant hollow noise of the tomtom and the quaint semi-religious nasal voices of half-clothed savages who stand cowed before you. Am I right, sir?" She laughed again, disguising her trepidation with the expertness of a finished actress.
Franklin turned away and helped himself to a cigarette. "You said that I could smoke."
"Of course."
With almost impish glee, Beatrix told herself that she had won the first round.
When a man pauses to smoke it is usually a sign either that he is tired or that he needs something to keep his nerves under control. Franklin lit a cigarette for the latter purpose. The girl's assumption of utter coolness made him want to take her roughly by the shoulders and shake her as he would a naughty child. Her air of enjoyment and mischief made him all the more determined to see the thing through to the logical end of it. He could see that she imagined she could mark time and possibly wear him out by the use of her wits, but that it did not occur to her how at any moment brute force might come into the argument. Ever since he had been old enough to go to school Franklin had resented being made a fool of, and any boy who had had the temerity to attempt to do so paid for it. He saw red on those occasions and could remember each one of them in every detail. He began to see red now. Not only had this young, wilful, uncontrolled child of wealth already made a most colossal fool of him, but there she was, calmer than he had ever seen her, treating him as though he were a green and callow youth, playing with him in order to break the monotony of a dull evening. His temper grew hotter.
"Listen!" he said. "It doesn't appear to be any use to treat you as an ordinary girl."
"Have you only just come to that conclusion?"