"Well, your taste and mine differ, my dear. I think she is a frump. Capron's wife now is good looking, and always dressed mag-nif-icently. But it makes a person sick to see the way they freeze on to all the decent men and never let them meet anyone else."
"But do the men want to meet anyone else? If one woman is witty, and the other pretty, what more is there to be desired?"
"You talk like a book with all the pages torn out, and the cover lost," said Sophie irritably.
Poppy laughed provokingly, and lay back in her chair, thinking—the whole thing was rather amazing. Abinger still here, and moving amongst pretty and witty women, whilst he pretended to be up in the Transvaal! His friend Umkoomata the Sturdy One, whom she had told herself she would like to know, here too, visiting Sophie Cornell, whom he plainly didn't like. Nick Capron! How odd the world was! She began to ponder about Intandugaza, too—whether he was the mysterious dark Irishman who went on secret expeditions——
"Man! Rosalind," broke in Sophie suddenly. "That fellow Abinger is just crazy to meet me. We ran into each other as I was coming out of Brookie's office yesterday, and he gave me a look that made me go hot all over. He's got those bad eyes that make you feel curly all down your spine—you know!"
Poppy turned away from her. With the remembrance of certain recent sensations still burning within her, she could not say that she did not know; but her mouth expressed weariness and disgust.
"It seems to me that you are talking about some kind of brute, Sophie," she said.
"Brute! Oh, I don't know," said Sophie, and laughed. The laugh sent Poppy out of the room with her teeth in her lip.
"I can't stand Sophie any longer," she said to herself in her own garden, looking at the rose-red walls of the house and the flaming flowers on the plant before the door. As she went indoors her thought changed; she began to smile subtly to herself.
"So Luce is in Durban all the time! He simply pretended to go away, to avoid discussing that matter of going out with me! And Mrs. Nick Capron! If I were to go out here, should I meet her? And would she recognise in me, I wonder, the little wretched vagabond of six years ago?"