"Why would you like me to meet her?"
"I'd like to hear you two argue. She thinks just the opposite. She thinks—"
"I never argue with a woman," Traill interrupted.
"You think so poorly of us?" She tried to say it with spirit—struck the flint in her eyes, contracted her lips to the hard, thin line.
"As women? No—the very best." Her looks did not worry him. Water pouring over marble runs off as smoothly. "You want to be judged as men—you never will be till you can cut your hair short and dress the part. Clothes have the deuce of a lot to do with it. I can love a woman, but, my God, I can't argue with her."
He leant back to let Berthe put the plates of soup before them, and Sally watched his face. It was very hard—high cheek-bones from which the flesh drooped in hollows to the jaws, the grey eyes well set, neither deep nor prominent, but flinching at nothing. There was no great show of intellectuality in the forehead—it was broad, smooth, but not high; yet none of the features were small. The jaw was square, the upper lip long. At one end the mouth seemed to bend upwards in a twist of irony, rather than humour, and the lips themselves were thin—lips that could cut each word to a point if they chose, before they uttered it, a mouth by no means sensitive to the hard things it could speak.
To Sally it both feared and fascinated. Whenever he was not looking, she could not take her eyes away. In the pictures in her mind, it showed itself most often in ironic rage; yet he could look at her with an expression that wooed the softest of thoughts in her heart. Then she felt a slave, and would have given him the world, held in her fingers, the gift would have seemed so small.
He looked up quickly from his plate—all motions of his head were alert. "Why don't you begin your soup?" he asked.
She laughed quietly, and commenced at once with childlike obedience.
"Has Mr. Arthur said anything to you since?" he inquired presently.