"You'd better learn."
"Could you give me a tip?" he asked timidly.
Then Helen threw back her pretty head and began to laugh with that irresponsible, unfeigned, full-throated and human laughter that characterized the primitive girl when her naïve sense of humour was stirred to response by her lover of the cave.
For Helen had caught a glimpse of this modern young caveman's intellectual brutality and bad temper for the first time in her life, and it was a vital revelation to the girl.
He had whacked her, verbally, violently, until, in her infuriated astonishment, it was made plain to her that there was much more to him than she had ever reckoned with. He had hurt her pride, dreadfully, he had banged her character about without mercy—handled her with a disdainful vigour and virility that opened her complacent brown eyes to a new vision and a new interpretation of man.
"Phil," she murmured, "do you realize that you were positively common in what you said to me up on that hill?"
"I know I was."
"You told me——" a slight shudder passed over her and he felt it in the shoulder that touched his—"you told me that you—you were 'fed up!'"
"I was!"
"And you, a poet—a man with an almost divine facility of language——"