“Yes.” A man always feels foolish under such a question as that.
“Many?”
“That depends on your ideas of proportion. Tigers must not be confounded with rabbits. I have shot enough to be able to beg your father’s acceptance of a skin when my boxes come.”
They walked on for some minutes in silence, awkward silence, she flicking at the corn ears with her white parasol. Then she said, “I feel sorry for the tiger.”
He answered, dryly, “The parents of his final supper did not take that view.”
“But,” he added, “I dare say you don’t quite understand about wild beasts, or heathen countries. I shouldn’t wonder, Juffrouw Rovers, if you had never even crossed the frontier.”
“No, I haven’t,” she answered, shortly, much put out by his innocent patronage, “and I am glad I haven’t. I should hate to come back as people do, finding all things small at home. And, above all, I should hate to go to India—a horrible place with spiders as big as my sunshade, and a python curled up, perhaps, under one’s pillow of nights. You needn’t laugh; I may have forgotten the dreadful creatures’ names, but I know they’re there, for my Uncle Mopius told me.”
“Ah, yes, your Uncle Mopius. He was out in Java, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was notary there, and he tells the most awful stories.”
“Then don’t believe them. So you would never go to India?”