"This detective work?" she replied.
"But why?" I asked. "What difference can it make to you in what way I employ myself?"
"For one thing," she said ruefully, "you'll be killed to a certainty. This dreadful man is clearly too clever for you."
"I fail to see the certainty, either of my being killed or of my being so hopelessly outwitted in cleverness," I replied stiffly; for it was somewhat mortifying to one's pride thus to be pronounced a fool and a failure.
"Besides, even if it be so," I added ungenerously, "my getting killed, or not killed, is my own affair, and cannot greatly concern you, to whom—as you reminded me yesterday—I am a stranger."
"Well, so you were—then. Almost a stranger, that is," she added, diplomatically. "But, you see, we know something more of you now. Promise you'll give it up from this time forth—'d'reckly moment,' as I used to say when I was a child, and was too impatient to wait for what I wanted."
On my first meeting with this extraordinary young woman I had been very properly snubbed and put in my place. On my second, I had been coldly informed that I must consider myself a stranger—as if only by effacing my previous behaviour entirely from her memory could my undesirable presence be endured at all. Yet now, on our third meeting, she was pouting her dainty lips at me, and pleading, in the prettiest way possible, that I would reconstruct and re-order my entire life to humour her unaccountable caprice.
Extraordinary, inexplicable, as her conduct was, the novelty of finding myself in the rôle of someone who was to be considered and conciliated, instead of a nobody who was to be effaced and ignored, was highly agreeable. Even had I been disposed to accede, off-hand, to her request—which I certainly was not—the situation was too pleasant for me to wish prematurely to end it.
"But why," I asked, "should you wish me to give up my detective work, or trouble yourself about me at all?"
"You are very unkind," she said, suddenly breaking down and, to my indescribable astonishment and dismay, bursting into tears.