"Tell me more."
He looked into her beautiful face, animated by genuine interest, and wondered if all men were willing so readily to obey her.
"It always interests me to hear from the man's own lips how he overcame obstacles."
"Sometimes I didn't overcome them. I ran away. After all, the strike in oil was a fluke."
"I don't think so. But go on," she prompted.
"Well, I've been manager of a cocoanut plantation in Penang; I've helped lay tracks in Upper India; had a hand in some bridges; sold patent-medicines; worked in a ruby mine; been a haberdasher in the Whiteaway, Laidlaw shop in Bombay; cut wood in the teak forests; helped exterminate the plague at Chitor and Udaipur; and never saved a penny. I never had an adventure in all my life."
"Why, your wanderings were adventures," she insisted. "Think of the things you could tell!"
"And never will," a smile breaking over his face.
How like Arthur's that smile was! thought the girl. "Romantic persons never have any adventures. It is to the prosaic these things fall. Because of their nearness you lose their values."
"There is some difference between romance and adventure. Romance is what you look forward to; adventure is something you look back upon. If many disagreeable occupations, hunger and an occasional fisticuff, may be classed as adventure, then I have had my run of it. But I always supposed adventure was the finding of treasures, on land and on sea; of filibustering; of fighting with sabers and pistols, and all that rigmarole. I can't quite lift my imagination up to the height of calling my six months' shovel-engineering on The Galle an adventure. It was brutal hard work; and many times I wanted to jump over. The Lascars often got out of trouble that way."