Frederica frowned. "I don't see how you can bother with shells when the world is just buzzing with real things! For instance, Smith has come out for votes for women. Isn't that splendid?"
"He'd come out for votes for Judas Iscariot if it would put him in office," he said, sharply; "and let me tell you, Fred, research work, in any department of science, helps the world, finally, a blamed-sight more than most of this hot air that the reformers turn on. It isn't so showy, but one single man like Pasteur is of more permanent value than all the Smiths in our very corrupt legislature, boiled down!"
"Peeved?" she said, good-naturedly. "Why don't you say 'one single woman like Madame Curie'? Well, buy your old shells, if you want to!"
"I will," he said, grinning. "How's business?"
When she announced some small success, he said, wonderingly, "You are the limit!" And added what he thought of her pluck and her intelligence: "I never knew a woman like you!"
"All women are like me—when you let 'em out."
"No, they're not!" he contradicted, with admiring rudeness.
The rudeness pleased her, as, no doubt, the male cave-dweller's candor of fist or foot pleased the female cave-dweller. His praise and wonder were like wine to her. She wanted more of it. Curled up on the sofa, she grew more and more daring in her talk; her face, flushing with excitement, was vividly handsome, and her mind was as vivid as her face; he could hardly keep up with her mind! She was an Intelligence to him, rather than a woman; and that was why he was totally unaware of anything unusual in the situation—the darkness and the solitude. There was absolutely no self-consciousness in him.
With her it was different—she was acutely self-conscious. Once a woman, bred in the tepid reticences of propriety, takes the plunge into free talk, the very tingle and exhilaration of the shock makes her strike out into still deeper water.... She talked about herself; of her life at home; of Mortimore—"He ought to have been killed when he was born," she said; "but, of course, he ought never to have been born."
"Of course," Howard said, gravely.