And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she turned away.
"Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called.
"Yes, I am not afraid of the truth—I did!" she answered with a backward glance and not stopping.
"Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a strain of what she classified as impudence.
"But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see—" and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and through the garden.
On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze or an ivory statuette.
1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color, his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and, mostly, by his latent savagery—which she would hardly have been willing to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself.
2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.
"I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and that is the last I shall hear of it," she concluded.
Not so. Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages.