Kingslake stopped short in his harangue, and looked at the other man doubtfully. “You take a cynical view,” he said.
“No. Merely a natural one.”
“You don’t believe that some women deliberately put love out of their lives?” asked Robert, tentatively.
“My dear chap, love never gives some women a chance to be so rude.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean the sort of woman who has a chance.”
“She’d take it.”
Kingslake regarded him with a curious expression for a moment; there was a look of dawning hope in his face, a half smile of pleased expectancy. Then it faded, and he resumed his former slightly sententious manner. “My dear Mayne,” he replied, “you’ve been out in the wilds for some years. You can’t be expected to know the spirit of the times. You don’t understand the modern woman.”
“My dear Kingslake,” returned Mayne, with great deliberation, “if I’d been out in the wilds, as you say, for fifty instead of five years, I should still disbelieve in her existence. There’s no such thing as a modern woman. She’s exactly as old as Eve. She doesn’t shake her curls nowadays, nor have hysterics. She writes for the Daily Mail, and plays hockey. But do you seriously think these trifling differences affect the eternal feminine? Not a bit of it.”
Robert looked at his watch. “I say, I’ve stopped, surely. It must be more than half-past twelve. What do you make it?”
Dick slowly drew out his watch. “Five-and-twenty past.” Kingslake threw away his half-smoked cigarette, and began to light another one. Mayne watched him.