"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a denial and relapsed into silence.
She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the economy of her utterances the more unfair.
Racking my brain for a new start, I fell back on those useful fellows, the authors. Presuming that any one who had lived in that fascinating region—the promised land of so many of us who are weary of English climatic treacheries—would be familiar with the literature of it, I went boldy to work.
"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was Ballantyne's 'Coral Island'."
"Indeed!" she replied.
I asked her if she too had not been brought up on Ballantyne, and she said no. She did not even know his name.
"He wrote for boys," I explained, rather lamely.
"I read poetry chiefly as a girl," she said.
"But surely you know Stevenson's 'Island Nights' Entertainments'?" I said.
No, she did not. Was it nice?