Volume Two—Chapter Twenty Three.
Why Chumbley was Brought.
As the Inche Maida uttered her angry threat she swept out of the room, leaving the two young officers staring at the heavy curtain that closed the door.
“The fury!—the tigress!” exclaimed Hilton.
“Well, I don’t know!” drawled Chumbley. “She seems to me very much like what woman is all the world round.”
“Why, she is a blood-thirsty savage!” cried Hilton.
“No: only a woman who has lived all her life where every man carries a sharp-pointed weapon. Englishwomen are much the same at heart.”
“Why, you blasphemer against the honour of our fair English maids and dames!” cried Hilton, laughing.
“Not I!” said Chumbley. “They don’t live amongst people who carry daggers and spears. We go unarmed—I mean Europeans—and pay soldiers to do our fighting for us; but you baffle a woman of spirit—you cross her and behave badly to her, and you see if she wouldn’t fight.”
“Fight, man?”