"Well, it doesn't matter. It isn't your fault." Mabel smoked reflectively. "I'm not jealous of him—a woman never is. It's the idea of another woman's getting away with her property, whether she wants it or not—that's what sets her mad-spot to humming. No, I don't give a—a cigarette butt—for that greasy bum actor. But I've always got to have somebody." She laughed. "The idea of his thinking you'd have him! What peacocks men are!"
Susan understood. The fact of this sort of thing was no longer a mystery to her. But the why of the fact—that seemed more amazing than ever. Now that she had discovered that her notion of love being incorporeal was as fanciful as Santa Claus, she could not conceive why it should be at all. As she was bringing round the braids for the new coiffure she had adopted she said to Mabel:
"You—love him?"
"I?" Mabel laughed immoderately. "You can have him, if you want him."
Susan shuddered. "Oh, no," she said. "I suppose he's very nice—and really he's quite a wonderful actor. But I—I don't care for men."
Mabel laughed again—curt, bitter. "Wait," she said.
Susan shook her head, with youth's positiveness.
"What's caring got to do with it?" pursued Mabel, ignoring the headshake. "I've been about quite a bit, and I've yet to see anybody that really cared for anybody else. We care for ourselves. But a man needs a woman, and a woman needs a man. They call it loving. They might as well call eating loving. Ask Burly."
CHAPTER XIV
AT breakfast Tempest was precisely as usual, and so were the others. Nor was there effort or any sort of pretense in this. We understand only that to which we are accustomed; the man of peace is amazed by the veteran's nonchalance in presence of danger and horror, of wound and death. To these river wanderers, veterans in the unconventional life, where the unusual is the usual, the unexpected the expected, whatever might happen was the matter of course, to be dealt with and dismissed. Susan naturally took her cue from them. When Tempest said something to her in the course of the careless conversation round the breakfast table, she answered—and had no sense of constraint. Thus, an incident that in other surroundings would have been in some way harmful through receiving the exaggeration of undue emphasis, caused less stir than the five huge and fiery mosquito bites Eshwell had got in the night. And Susan unconsciously absorbed one of those lessons in the science and art of living that have decisive weight in shaping our destinies. For intelligent living is in large part learning to ignore the unprofitable that one may concentrate upon the profitable.