"And he's such a fine dog, too," she added in a tone intended to convey to me the full extent of her pity for him.
"I have him remarkably well trained," I said. "I can often force him to notice people whom I like, especially if they are clever enough to let him see that they like me rather well."
"It would be almost worth while," she remarked with a longing look at Jim but none at me.
"Many have found it quite so," I said, ordering Jim to charge at my feet, "but it's a great bore, I assure you."
I needed not to be told that she envied me my power, and so deep and genuine appeared to be her love for him that secretly I hoped he would again be amiable to her during my absence on the morrow. The contrast of his manner on my return would further chasten her.
From the porch we both watched her move across the little stretch of lawn, and, at my whispered suggestion, Jim rose to his feet and barked her insultingly over the last twenty feet of it. I was delighted to note that this induced a shamed acceleration of her pace and a tighter clutching of her skirts. I thought it important to let her know clearly and at once just who was the master in my own house.
[CHAPTER XXIV]
THE LOYALTY OF JIM
If it must be my lot to dream out a life of insubstantial visions, that were well. But it appeared not unreasonable that I should keep at least one ponderable dog by me, as an emblem of something I had missed through one too many shuffle of the cards before this big game began. Yet Miss Lansdale had clearly resolved to deprive my dreaming of even this slight support of realness. I tried always to remember, in her behalf, that she did not know the circumstances, and she herself very soon discovered that she did not know Jim. The assaults she made upon his fidelity proved her to be past-mistress of tactics and strategy. No possible approach to his heart did she leave untried. She flattered and petted, lured, cajoled, entreated; she menaced, commanded, stormed, raged. Drawing inspiration from a siege celebrated in antiquity, she sought to secrete her forces—not in a horse of wood, but within the frames of numerous fowl, picked to the bone but shredded over so temptingly with fugitive succulence as to have made a dog of feelings less fine her slave for life.
It was not until the desperate woman had, in the terminology of Billy Durgin, been "baffled and beaten at every turn," that I could get into communication with her on a basis at all acceptable to a free-necked man. Having proved to the last resource of her ingenuity that Jim was more than human in his loyalty, she seemed disposed to admit, though grudgingly enough, that I myself might be not less than human to have won him so utterly. And thereafter I found it often practicable to associate with her on terms of apparent equality.