“But I won’t go to Sydney,” she cried. “I simply won’t. I’ll buy in to the extent of my money as a small partner in some other plantation. Let me buy in in Berande!”
“Heaven forbid!” he cried in such genuine dismay that she broke into hearty laughter.
“There, I won’t tease you. Really, you know, I’m not accustomed to forcing my presence where it is not desired. Yes, yes; I know you’re just aching to point out that I’ve forced myself upon you ever since I landed, only you are too polite to say so. Yet as you said yourself, it was impossible for me to go away, so I had to stay. You wouldn’t let me go to Tulagi. You compelled me to force myself upon you. But I won’t buy in as partner with any one. I’ll buy Pari-Sulay, but I’ll put only ten boys on it and clear slowly. Also, I’ll invest in some old ketch and take out a trading license. For that matter, I’ll go recruiting on Malaita.”
She looked for protest, and found it in Sheldon’s clenched hand and in every line of his clean-cut face.
“Go ahead and say it,” she challenged. “Please don’t mind me. I’m—I’m getting used to it, you know. Really I am.”
“I wish I were a woman so as to tell you how preposterously insane and impossible it is,” he blurted out.
She surveyed him with deliberation, and said:
“Better than that, you are a man. So there is nothing to prevent your telling me, for I demand to be considered as a man. I didn’t come down here to trail my woman’s skirts over the Solomons. Please forget that I am accidentally anything else than a man with a man’s living to make.”
Inwardly Sheldon fumed and fretted. Was she making game of him? Or did there lurk in her the insidious unhealthfulness of unwomanliness? Or was it merely a case of blank, staring, sentimental, idiotic innocence?
“I have told you,” he began stiffly, “that recruiting on Malaita is impossible for a woman, and that is all I care to say—or dare.”