“I wish you would,” said Gwen laughing, “we walked, and I am so thirsty.”
“Hu!” said Brydon, examining his milk-jug when he had filled his kettle and set it on the little charcoal stove, “every drop gone! I won’t be two minutes. The old lady on the first flat and I are affinities to a certain extent; in return for sundry packets of English tea, she keeps me in milk at odd times. Strange, will you shepherd the kettle?”
“I wonder if his cups are clean?” said Strange rummaging them out of a cupboard over the stove, “look, an inch thick with dust, and the handles! That fellow moons too much to be very cleanly. Look at the tea-cloth, Lord! Have you a clean handkerchief, Gwen?”
Gwen’s brows contracted slightly. She was a dainty person and unpractical, and teacups in connection with handkerchiefs gave her an uncomfortable feeling of impropriety.
She gave him a handkerchief however, with a small gasp of disgust, and watched his doings with a faint, half-scornful interest.
“How particular you are!” she said, “I had no idea you could trouble yourself about such things.”
“I can’t stand dirt in man or beast.”
“How did you stand travelling—in Algeria, for example?”
“Ah! there—there were compensations, the game was worth the candle, and if civilization has produced nothing better—give the devil his due—it has produced clean skins and clean eating. I fancy I was originally designed for an inspector of nuisances,” he continued, running Gwen’s lovely morsel of cambric on the end of a pointed stick in and out the handle of a cup.
Gwen noticed with some wonder the curiously delicate way in which he did it, “The thing would have smashed long ago in any other man’s hand,” she thought. “He treats women like that, he is very gentle, but he is the master, he holds them in his hand and does as he likes with them. And I have no doubt whatever, that there are at this minute hundreds of women who would like it. Why doesn’t that handle break and cut him—there is no legal bond between them?” This struck her grim sense of humour, and she had to bite her lips to keep in a wild laugh.