Then he laughed—with an effort, I thought. It was not a successful laugh.
So we sat for a few moments, in silence and smoke. So men sit often in this queer tangle of life—smoking, smiling, speaking the commonplace phrases that are the current small change of human intercourse, yet hating each other in their hearts.
“I say, Eckhart”—it was a little later on that he came out with this—“you know who she is, of course.”
There was no good in pretending ignorance. God knows I am not quite the child I sometimes seem, even to myself. So I nodded.
He looked narrowly at me. I met his gaze. I was just a thin, nervous man, a little bald, sitting quietly there and smoking, yet all the time that drooping left eyelid irritated me so that I wanted to reach right over and tear it off his face. But I only nodded.
“Dangerous game, my boy,” said he.
That was his assumption, of course—that to me, too, she was merely a quarry in the endless, universal pursuit of woman by man. Out here on the Coast, of course, from the point of view of the hard world about us, any lone woman is quite legitimate prey.
He was still studying me.
“I 'm wondering how much you know,” he went on.
“About what?” said I, confused.