“We’ve split again,” he answered. “Worse than ever before.” And he added anxiously: “You don’t think she’ll have been doing anything rash?”
“Anything rash!” she mocked him pleasantly. “She’s never in her life done anything else. But if you mean gone under a motor-bus, I can tell you this, Mr. Toto, she too jolly well means to have you to do anything of that sort. What’s the matter now?”
He related as carefully as he could, and then she said: “For a couple of darlings you are the most extraordinary creatures on earth. Katya’s Katya, of course; but why in Heaven’s name you can’t be reasonable it passes me to understand.”
“Reasonable!” Grimshaw exclaimed.
“Well,” Ellida answered, “you don’t know Katya as I do. You think, I dare say, that she’s a cool, manlike sort of chap. As a matter of fact, she’s a mere bundle of nerves and insane obstinacies. I don’t mean to say that she’s not adorable. She’s just the most feminine thing in the world, but what you ought to do is perfectly plain. You ought to bring her to her knees. If you won’t give in to her—it would be the easiest thing to do—it would be just as easy to bring her to her knees.”
“It would?” Grimshaw asked.
“Yes,” she said, “easy, but I dare say a bit of a bore. You go off with some other woman, and she’ll be after you with hatchets and knives in ten seconds after she hears the news. That’s Katya. It’s Kitty, too, and I dare say it would be me if I ever had anything in the world to contrarify me.”
“Oh, I’m tired out,” he answered. “I told you some time ago that if I grew very, very tired I should give in to her. Well, I’ve come down to tell her that, if she’ll take on Dudley, she can take me on, too, on her own terms.”
Ellida looked up at him with her quick and birdlike eyes.
“Well, look here, Mr. Toto,” she said, “if you’re going to do that, you’d better get it told to her quick. If you don’t catch her on the hop before she’s got time to harden into it as an obstinacy, you’ll find that she’ll have made it a rule of life never to speak to you again; and then there’ll be nothing for it but you’re carrying on with—oh, say Etta Hudson—until Katya gets to the daggers and knives stage.”