The Palace of Darkened Windows | Page 3

pardon, but you--he--I--" So many things occurred to him to say at one and the same time that he emitted a snort of warring and incoherent syllables. Finally, with supreme control, "Do you know that your 'gentleman of rank' couldn't set foot in a gentleman's club in this country?"
"I think it's mean!" retorted the girl, her blue eyes very bright and indignant. "You English come here and look down on even the highest members of the country you are pretending to assist. Why do you? When he was at Oxford he went into your English homes."
"English madhouses--for admitting him."
A brief silence ensued.
The girl ate a cake. It was a nice cake, powdered with almonds, but she ate it obliviously. The angry red shone rosily in her cheeks.
The young man took a hasty drink of his tea, which had grown cold in its cup, and pushed it away. Obstinately he rushed on in his mad career.
"I simply cannot understand you!" he declared.
"Does it matter?" said she, and bit an almond's head off.
"It would be bad enough, in any city, but in Cairo--! To permit him to insult you with his company, alone, upon the streets!"
"When you have said insult you have said a little too much," she returned in a small, cold voice of war. "Is there anything against Captain Kerissen personally?"
"Who knows anything about any of those fellows? They are all alike--with half a dozen wives locked up behind their barred windows."
"He isn't married."
"How do you know?"
"I--inferred it."
The Englishman snorted: "According to his custom, you know, it isn't the proper thing to mention his ladies in public."
"You are frightfully unjust. Captain Kerissen's customs are the customs of the civilized world, and he is very anxious to have his country become modernized."
"Then let him send his sisters out walking with fellow officers.... For him to walk beside you----"
"He was following the custom of my country," said the girl, with maddening superiority. "Since I am an American girl----"
The young Englishman said a horrible thing. He said it with immense feeling.
"American goose!" he uttered, then stopped short. Precipitately he floundered into explanation:
"I beg your pardon, but, you know, when you say such bally nonsense as that--! An American girl has no more business to be imprudent than a Patagonian girl. You have no idea how these people regard----"
"Oh, don't apologize," murmured the girl, with charming sweetness. "I don't mind what you say--not in the least."
The outraged man was not so befuddled but what he saw those danger signals now. They glimmered scarlet upon his vision, but his blood was up and he plunged on to destruction with the extraordinary remark, "But isn't there a reason why you should?"
She gazed at him in mock reflection, as if mulling this striking thought presented for her consideration, but her eyes were too sparkly and her cheeks too poppy-pink to substantiate the reflective pose.
"N-no," she said at last, with an impertinent little drawl. "I can't seem to think of any."
He did not pause for innuendo. "You mean you don't give a piastre what I think?"
"Not half a piastre," she confirmed, in flat defiance.
The young man looked at her. He was over the brink of ruin now; nothing remained of the interesting little affair of the past three weeks but a mangled and lamentable wreck at the bottom of a deep abyss.
Perhaps a shaft of compunction touched her flinty soul at the sight of his aghast and speechless face, for she had the grace to look away. Her gaze encountered the absorbed and excited countenance of Billy B. Hill, and the poppy-pink of her cheeks became poppy-red and she turned her head sharply away. She rose, catching up her gloves and parasol.
"Thank you so much for your tea," she said in a lowered tone to her unfortunate host. "I've had a delicious time.... I'm sorry if I disappointed you by not cowering before your disapproval. Oh, don't bother to come in with me--I know my way to the lift and the band is going to play God Save the King and they need you to stand up and make a showing."
Billy B. Hill stared across at the abandoned young man with supreme sympathy and intimate understanding. He was a nice and right-minded young man and she was an utter minx. She was the daughter of unreason and the granddaughter of folly. She needed, emphatically needed, to be shown. But this Englishman, with his harsh and violently antagonizing way of putting things, was clearly not the man for the need. It took a lighter touch--the hand of iron in the velvet glove, as it were. It took a keener spirit, a softer humor.
Billy threw out his chest and drew himself up to his full five feet eleven and one-half inches, as he passed indoors and sought the hotel register,