“Oh, if you put it that way—why, of course. I know what you mean; but what is life, anyway? No fellow can find out; nobody knows much about it.”
“Well I do, and I intend to enjoy it,” and she filled her lungs with the mountain air, which gave her such buoyancy that she took off her hat, and shook back her hair to be en rapport with her own ideal.
“That’s all right, while you feel like it.” To Paul she looked like the personification of New Life for him; and he came near kissing her to assure himself she was not a wood-nymph who might vanish in a tree.
“People are not so stupid as you think,” said Adele.
“Well, what do they really know?” asked Paul, his double-self amused to hear a girl assume that she knew more of life than he, a man.
Their attention was distracted for a moment.
On the road close by they heard the tramp of feet approaching, and they were near enough to speak if it proved to be anyone they knew. A dandy, a variety of palanquin, was passing, and inside was a woman of the English Colony. The livery of her bearers was rather conspicuous, being yellow with blue trimmings, yet not in bad taste for that region. The toilet of the beauty inside the dandy was decidedly “chic,” and the pose between the curtains drawn aside was certainly most captivating. Many had said of her: “Thy bright smile haunts me still.”
Paul recognized the occupant at a glance; to Adele she was a stranger. Paul had met her accidentally and incidentally; and upon so slight an acquaintance had received an invitation to join a card-party at her apartments. The invitation had been sent him before the soi-disant widow knew that Paul was there a member of a family party, or she would have known it was useless to waste a thought on him.
Not being a man who played cards for money, and for some other reasons, Paul had sent a polite regret; after acknowledging to himself with a laugh that he had been innocently caught by that sort of thing once before, and didn’t intend to be again. But the fellows persisted that he was “a fool not to go and see the fun,” as the fair creature was only one of many birds of passage stranded in India, and “devilish amusing” when sitting at the head of her own table.
Paul preferred not to sit at that sort of a table; and when this dashing woman of the world, a notable representative of her set, thus appeared on the public road in her dandy state-conveyance, so very near Adele, he instinctively stepped between them; and became so much engrossed with Adele’s wraps and her comfort, getting her things all mixed up when no attention was necessary, that the fair one had passed without receiving the slightest sign of recognition from either of them.