"Cruel--cruel."
"Silly--silly," she mocked, then glanced round with up-raised eyebrows; "don't make a scene, monsieur, or I shall begin to believe that you appreciate our English custom of lingering over the wine."
"Will you let me explain?" entreated the Russian.
"Certainly--to-morrow, at four. Ill be in the picture gallery. Good night;" and with a friendly nod she moved away.
Demetrius swore softly in Russian, which is a most picturesque language in many ways. Without a glance, Lady Jim ascended the stairs, well pleased. Demetrius was losing command of himself, and therefore would be all the easier to manage, should she require his services. "I'll have that twenty thousand before spring," she decided.
[ CHAPTER X]
"What is love?" asked Leah, the next day, at twenty minutes past four of a clear wintry afternoon.
With all his knowledge of five languages, Demetrius could find no answer, and rose from his knees with the feelings of a man who is trying to melt an iceberg with a lucifer match. Ever since Lady Jim arrived to keep her appointment in the picture gallery, he had been explaining his feelings at length, and in the orthodox attitude of a mortal worshipping a goddess. He had crossed his "t's" and dotted his "i's" with the utmost precision. From English he had glided into French, to plead the attractions of illicit passion: two minutes of German resulted in sentimental assertions of that passion's righteousness, and in illustrations of Wertherism; and, immediately before she asked that impossible question, he had harked back to her native tongue, to impress upon her the solid British common-sense of his wooing. Leah listened to this polyglot love-making with the feeling that she was camping under the tower of Babel. Demetrius might have been a gramophone, pouring out recitations from the poets, for all the impression his impassionate rhetoric made on her well-trained feelings.
"I suppose all these speeches can be classified under the heading of love," she said unkindly, when his exhaustion gave her an opportunity of intervening. "But--what is love?"
"I have been trying to explain," stammered the Russian, getting on his legs dispiritedly.