‘I won’t,’ says Betty, giggling. ‘I’ll be as honest as the sun. You looked’—pausing wickedly—‘something between Meg Merrilees and a wild Indian, with a bias toward the latter. But that needn’t put you out. He’s accustomed to wild Indians; and when one has lived with people fifty years or so, one gets to admire them. I shouldn’t wonder if he admired you. You must have taken him back to the good old days. Why didn’t you sing “Way down upon the Swannee River” for him? That would have finished the conquest.’
‘You don’t seem to know what wild Indians are,’ Susan remonstrates calmly. ‘They live in North America, and couldn’t sing a nigger song to save their lives. You don’t seem to know, either, that it was in Africa that Mr. Crosby spent most of his time, and that the blacks there aren’t niggers at all.’
‘Oh, it’s all the same,’ says Betty airily. ‘A black’s a black for a’ that; and if they don’t sing one thing, they sing another. And any way, I could see by the gleam in Mr. Crosby’s eye, as he looked at you and your flowing locks, that he loves wildness in every form.’
Susan is silent for a time; then:
‘Betty’—in a low tone—‘how old do you think he is?’
‘I don’t think he has beaten Methuselah yet, if you mean that.’
‘No; but really, I mean how old, eh?’
‘Well’—carefully—‘allowing him the fifty years he spent with his blacks, and the fact that he told us that he started at twenty-three on an adventurous career, he must be now well into the seventies.’
Susan’s laugh—so evidently expected here—sounds to herself a little forced, though why she could not have explained.
‘Oh, not so old as that!’