"The absurdity isn't my only hunch," she went on, after the frank-speaking manner of her kind. "This Robinson Crusoe experience is going to be a dreadful thing, in a way. There won't be any illusions left for any of us, I'm afraid—any more than there were for the people of the Stone Age."
That sage remark brought on more talk, and we speculated cheerfully on the death of the illusions and what might reasonably be expected as the results thereof. My chatty companion had a lively imagination, and her forecastings of the changes that would ensue in the different members of our colony were handsomely entertaining.
"And you," she said, when she had worked her way around to me in the prophesying; "I can just see what an unlivable person you will become."
"Why should I be so particularly unlivable?" I asked.
"That awful temper of yours," she went on baldly. "With all the civilized veneer cracked and peeling off—my-oh!"
Now it is one thing to be well assured, in one's own summings-up, of the possession of a violent temper, and quite another to be told bluntly that the possession is a commonly accepted fact among one's friends and acquaintances. Edie Van Tromp's assertion of the fact as one that had—or might have been—published in the newspapers came with a decided shock.
"Am I as bad as all that?" I protested.
"Everybody knows what a vile temper you have," she replied coolly. "Anybody who couldn't get along with Conetta Kincaide without quarreling with her———"
"Oh; so she has told you I have quarreled with her?"
"There you go," she gibed. "One has only to mention Conetta to you to touch off the powder train. What makes you quarrel with her, Uncle Dick?"