“Hardly any,” she replied. “It's rather lonesome.” Then she broke into a laugh.
“I was so terrified at meeting you the first time. Dale can talk of no one else. He makes a kind of god of you. I felt I was going to hate you like the devil. I expected quite a different person.”
The diplomatist listens to much and says little.
“Indeed,” I remarked.
She nodded. “I thought you would be a big beefy man with a red face, you know. He gave me the idea somehow by calling you a 'splendid chap.' You see, I couldn't think of a 'splendid chap' with a white face and a waxed moustache and your way of talking.”
“I am sorry,” said I, “not to come up to your idea of the heroic.”
“But you do!” she cried, with one of her supple twists of the body. “It was I that was stupid. And I don't hate you at all. You can see that I don't. I didn't even hate you when you came as an enemy.”
“Ah!” said I. “What made you think that? We agreed to argue it out, if you remember.”
She drew out of a case beside her one of her unspeakable cigarettes. “Do you suppose,” she said, lighting it, and pausing to inhale the first two or three puffs of smoke, “do you suppose that a woman who has lived among wild beasts hasn't got instinct?”
I drew my chair nearer to the fire. She was beginning to be uncanny again.