"Oh, bromidic Miss Smith!—Drink your wine, please. And do not look doubtfully upon that sandwich. My man knows how to build them."
His man did. The sandwich was manna. The wine evidently came from heaven.
"Now you have a color. I say, is Morenas going to do you, too?"
"Good gracious, no! But he has sketched Alicia a dozen times at least."
"And me," said Mr. Jelnik, gloomily. "There's no evading the brute. I turn like a weathercock; and there he is, with corrugated brow and slitted eyes, studying me! And the baleful eye of The Author also pursues me. Between them, I feel skinned."
"Mr. Morenas says you are a rare but quite perfect type," I told him, mischievously.
The young man shrugged his shoulders disdainfully. "Am I a type, Woman-in-the-Woods?" he asked.
"Indeed, you are absolutely different from anybody else." And then, terrified, I turned red.
"Oh, I know! You didn't mean it either as a brick-bat or a bouquet, merely the truth as you see it. You are transparently truthful, fundamentally truthful, and at the same time the American business woman! You can't understand how that intrigues me!"
And then, quite simply and boyishly, he began to talk about himself. I got glimpses of a boyhood spent partly in a stately home in Vienna, and partly roaming about the great Hungarian estate which his mother loved, and to which the two returned summer after summer, until her death. Then student days, and after that, foot-loose wanderings up and down the earth and across the seven seas.