"Oh, I should love to. And your pictures! You must show me those, too."
"I'll be glad to. We will get up a party, some time. I've lots of delightful friends among the painters and musical people. You'd like them, I know."
"It's the life I've always dreamed of," she said, her cheeks flushing with excitement. "I've been to so many places, Rome and Paris, and Vienna and Cairo, and the East, you know, but I really know very little about them. The outside I have seen, of course, but the real life—that I have missed. And now we are stuck down here, where we don't know anybody, because father fancies it is good for his health. I suppose it is, but it isn't real, joyous living. I hardly feel alive."
"But you go to London, don't you? Your father spoke of his house there."
"Oh, yes, we are there a great deal, but father's friends are mostly professors of Assyriology and Egyptology, and people of that sort, and they come and stay for hours and talk about scarabs and hieroglyphics and mummies, and all that sort of thing. Sometimes I feel almost as though I were about to become a mummy myself."
She certainly did not look it, with her wonderful color, heightened by the firelight and her large and brilliant eyes. I could not help looking deep into them as I replied.
"We must prevent that, at all costs. Let me show you what it is to really live."
"Isn't that rather a large order? And we have known each other for so short a time, too." She laughed nervously, but did not seem displeased at my remark.
"I think the experiences of the past week have caused us to know each other very well," I said, gravely, "and I hope you may think as much of the friendship which has come to us as I do."
"Are we then really friends?" she said slowly. "I never had a man friend—nor very many of any sort, I fear. We have always moved about so much from place to place."