Power was staggered; but he did not mean to provide a permanent target for the shafts of Miss Marguerite Sinclair’s wit. At present she was treating him as though she were “rotting” some small schoolboy.
“Leave the chair—I have changed my mind,” he said, and dismissed the steward with a tip. Then he sat down, and scrutinized the girl so brazenly that her eyes fell, and she blushed.
“There is no help for it,” he explained. “I suppose we ought to be able, at least, to recognize each other when we meet.”
“I should know you again in twenty years; you are not a two-faced person, like me,” she retorted.
“It is consoling to find that you can be as unfair to yourself as you were to me last night.”
“Would you have me twist my neck like a parrot, and say, ‘Please look on this picture, not on that,’ when a stranger happens to be to port instead of to starboard?”
“I do really think it would be worth while,” he said.
He saw now that she was a girl of twenty or thereabouts, and a singularly attractive one from this new point of view. He felt that he must atone for the curt order to the steward; but she only laughed at the implied compliment.
“The poor fellow saw us talking together, and arranged the chairs accordingly,” she said. “I’m frankly pleased, and you say you are; so that’s all right. Let us swap symptoms, as grand folk do in society. I have told you how I secured my keepsake. How did you acquire a limp?”
“By lying too long in one position,” he replied, unconsciously emulating her flippancy.