"I had no idea it was so serious as this," teased Stanley.
"Nor had I," returned Cyrilla easily, "until I began to talk about him. Don't tell him, Mr. Baird, or he might take advantage of me."
The idea amused Stanley. "He doesn't care a rap about women," said he. "I hear he has let a few care about him from time to time, but he soon ceased to be good-natured. He hates to be bored."
As he came just then, they had to find another subject. Mildred observed him with more interest. She had learned to have respect for Mrs. Brindley's judgments. But she soon gave over watching him. That profound calm, those eyes concentrating all the life of the man like a burning glass— She had a disagreeable sense of being seen through, even to her secretest thought, of being understood and measured and weighed—and found wanting. It occurred to her for the first time that part of the reason for her not liking him was the best of reasons—that he did not like her.
The first time she was left alone with him, after this discovery, she happened to be in an audacious and talkative mood, and his lack of response finally goaded her into saying: "WHY don't you like me?" She cared nothing about it; she simply wished to hear what he would say—if he could be roused into saying anything. He was sitting on the steps leading from the veranda to the sea—was smoking a cigarette and gazing out over the waves like a graven image, as if he had always been posed there and always would be there, the embodiment of repose gazing in ineffable indifference upon the embodiment of its opposite. He made no answer.
"I asked you why you do not like me," said she. "Did you hear?"
"Yes," replied he.
She waited; nothing further from him. Said she:
"Well, give me one of your cigarettes."
He rose, extended his case, then a light. He was never remiss in those kinds of politeness. When she was smoking, he seated himself again and dropped into the former attitude. She eyed him, wondering how it could be possible that he had endured the incredible fatigues and hardships Stanley Baird had related of him—hunting and exploring expeditions into tropics and into frozen regions, mountain climbs, wild sea voyages in small boats, all with no sign of being able to stand anything, yet also with no sign of being any more disturbed than now in this seaside laziness. Stanley had showed them a picture of him taken twenty years and more ago when he was in college; he had looked almost the same then—perhaps a little older.