“No, I’m afraid not. That’s the trouble, to my mind. He can only see Ziné now as Ziné, and not as, so to speak, ‘essence of girl’ in the abstract.”
“Fancy talking of Ziné as something abstract! Harilek, I’m ashamed of you for even thinking such a thing.”
“I didn’t. I only said Forsyth ought to.”
“And why ought he to?”
“Because he’s like the rest of us—mere wanderers—here to-day and gone to-morrow.”
“Perhaps you won’t go. Perhaps your camels will die or something, and you’ll have to spend your lives here without any nice looking-glasses or that funny stuff that you smoke, and have to wear Sakae clothes for the rest of your lives.”
“Then I should jolly well walk across the desert.”
“That’s not polite, since I live here. You ought to say you would be very glad if something kept you here.”
“I shouldn’t be glad if something kept me here. Things don’t make up life: people do. Possibly if some one kept me here it might be different.”
Aryenis’s pony shied at nothing as far as I could see, and it took her a minute or two to get him under control again, by which time she seemed to have lost the thread, and got back to the question of the doctor.