"Why do you say that?"
"It's true. Men seek friendship among men. Men like few or no women, but almost any female. That is the real truth. Why dodge it?"
"How old are you, Thusis?"
"Not old—as you mean it."
She had finished her luncheon, and now she leaned over and bathed her lips and fingers in the icy stream. There, like some young woodland thing out of the golden age of vanished gods she hovered, playing at the glimmering water's edge, scooping up handfuls of golden gravel from the bottom and letting them slide back through her dripping fingers.
"I'll tell you this," she said, looking at the water: "I don't like men. I never did. Any I might have been inclined to like I had already been born to hate.... You don't understand, do you?"
"No."
She smiled, sat erect, and dried her fingers on her handkerchief.
"Be flattered," she said. "No other man before you has had even a glimpse of my real self. And I really don't know why I've given you that much. I ask myself. I don't know.... But,"—and her sweet, reckless laughter flashed—"the very devil seemed to possess me when I first saw you, Don Michael. I was amazingly careless. But you were so funny! I was indiscreet. But you were so solemn and so typically and guilelessly masculine."
"Was I?" said I, getting redder and redder.