"Eddin Bey is rather attractive," she mused, letting her glance rest on me sideways while the innocent pleasure of this discovery parted her lips in a honeyed smile.
"All right," said I shortly, "dance with him!"
"Michael——"
"Go ahead and dance with him," I repeated, stabbed by the most ignoble of emotions.
"What an absolute boy you can be," she said. "If I do this thing at all it is because the tension of months is becoming unendurable. Reaction from the tragic usually lands one on the edges of the grotesque.... If you had been a girl, Michael, always sheltered, secure, living a colorless restricted life, and if you suddenly were cast upon your own feet with the accumulated responsibility of your race on your shoulders,—and if, in the very middle of your first years of liberty and opportunity you suddenly found this wonderful world flaming like hell all about you, and all its inhabitants at each other's throats, and all delight in living turned to hate and fear—and if you concluded to take your fate into your own hands and run away from authority, and, in your own way, fight the good fight for God and King and Country,—and if the strain became, for an hour, too great—wouldn't you react—perhaps to the verge of folly?"
"You bet I would, sweetness," said I, taking her lovely hands in mine.
"I was a school-girl," she said, "when—it devolved upon me, and upon Clelia, to determine our own futures.... The loss of parents is a—bewildering thing.... Our mania was travel and education to fit us for—for what we considered to be our rightful future positions in the world.... We have been in your country,—I don't mean Chile. We know England and France—God bless them both. Then, owing deference anyway if not perhaps blind obedience to the—to a—gentleman in Italy——"
"The King," I said soberly.
"Yes, the King of Italy. We were expected to return to Rome and defer to him all questions concerning our future.... And we ran away."
"Why, Thusis?"