"I think you are extremely selfish, and desperately weak with even ugly women, and quite a brute when you don't get your own pretty way, and--in short, you are a man, a glorious lord of creation." "Oh, drop rottin'."
"I am not rotting, as you delicately put it. Like myself, this sugary civilisation has spoiled you. If you had to earn your bread I should respect you, Jim. I might even love you. Yes"--she considered for a moment--"I daresay it might come to that."
Jim was growing bewildered. "What does all this mean?" was his very natural interrogation.
His wife bewildered him still more by acting in a way which made him gasp. She walked round the table, and, standing at his back, placed her arms round his neck. "I'll tell you, Jim. I have just found out by my very own self that you and I are cave-people pitchforked into the wrong century. We live ten thousand years too late--just think of it--ten thousand years of life and death. Let us go back to the mud, Jim, and take up the life where we left it when you were killed, spearing that mammoth."
"Leah!" His head was thrown back, and his eyes stared upward in alarm.
"I know what you think, but I am as sane as you are, and ten times cleverer. No;" she loosened her arms from his neck and locked them behind her. "Look at me, Jim. Am I a doll?"
The startled Duke wheeled his chair and stared at her brilliant eyes, no longer hard and cold, at her stately figure, her splendid red hair, her clearly cut face flushed and animated. "You're a rippin' fine woman," said he, his sluggish pulses stirred.
"So you think--so the world thinks. Yet I have to live in a wadded box like a wax doll. I want to get out of that box--it stifles me, chokes me. I am sick of the tents of Shem, and wish to house under those of Esau. You and I will take the privilege of rank and be eccentric. As pals we'll get on much better than as a Mayfair man and wife of the wrong sort, beyond the borders of this horrid civilisation that is. Buy a yacht, Jim--a tramp hulk with those triple expansion engines you told me about, and let us make for the South Seas. There's a clear path down Channel. Let us explore, let us venture into the Naked Lands and exploit the fringes of the empire. I want to live--to live, you understand. Oh," she cried almost fiercely, "can't you understand?"
"No," said Jim, truthfully, and as stolid as ever; "you have your rank to think of, and my name."
The fire died out of Leah's eyes, the colour from her face, the ring from her voice; even her figure seemed to dwindle from that of a tragedy queen into a conventional Belgravian wife. Then she laughed shortly, and in a way which Jim did not approve of in his Duchess.