Elsa, on deck, under the festive bit of awning aft, was gazing through her glasses.
“The Ainu,” she observed, letting her eyes droop very much, “must still be carousing. There’s no one to be seen on the whole island but that Japanese. I hear you attacked him like a lot of Indians last night,” she smiled.
“Yes,” Jerome replied, “I’m afraid I was a little more noisy than the situation really called for.”
“On the contrary,” she assured him, her brown eyes full of moist yet undemonstrative appreciation, “it must have been really quite splendid. I’m sorry I had to miss it.”
“How did you spend the evening?”
“After you went ashore? Oh, I read a few chapters in my stupid book, and tried to walk myself sleepy—well, what kind of an evening would you expect me to put in, with no thrills but those I could stir up myself? And all the while you were having wild and impossible adventures—you and Stella and the Japanese and Stella’s prince.... It really seems unfair, doesn’t it? I shall never forgive the Captain for keeping me cooped up out here.” And then she added with feeling, yet very evenly: “How I hate being a woman!”
Stella watched them from a little distance. She seemed eagerly observing every detail of their conduct together, with eyes which contained only a look of quiet inevitability.
“Of course,” she murmured to herself, “it would be like that. It would have to be.”
“Do you suppose,” asked Elsa, smiling up at him in her grave, unassailable way, “you’ll be having such adventures in Tripoli?”
He shrugged, and Stella heard him laugh.