distant to Shane as his salutation was curt to her. Shane was
suddenly annoyed.

[Illustration]

The captain of the American boat talked incessantly while the band
blared on. Strolling Argentines eyed the woman's blond beauty at a
respectful distance. They trotted to and fro. They loped. They postured.
She paid no attention. To her they were nonexistent. To the American
skipper's conversation she replied only with a flicker of the eyelids, a
fleeting smile of her lips. Shane she seemed to ignore. She was so
clean, so cool, so damnably self-possessed.

"Froken Hagen," Campbell ventured, "aren't you sick of all this? Captain
Lincoln says you have been here for five years. Aren't you dead tired of
it?"

"No." Her voice was a strong soprano timbre.

"Don't you want to get back to the North again?"

"Often." She had a quiet aloof smile. Somewhere was the impression of a
gentlewoman. She did not mean to be abrupt. She was just immensely
self-possessed.

It occurred to Shane suddenly that he liked this woman. He liked her
dignity, her grave composure. He liked her coolness, her almost Viennese
grace. He liked her features; but for the wideness of her mouth, and the
little prominence of chin, she would have been immensely beautiful. Her
corn-like hair, massively braided, must be like a mane when down, and
beneath her Paris frock he could sense her deep bosom, great marble
limbs. Her voice had the cool sweet beauty of Northern winds.... Her
eyes were steady, her chin uptilted. Somewhere, some time, somehow she
had mastered fate.

About, in the gas-lit square, escorted, guarded, went other women,
reputable women. Great rawboned women, daughters of Irish _portenos_,
with the coarseness of the Irish peasant in their faces, the brogue of
the Irish peasant on their Spanish, but punctiliously Castilian as to
manners; gross Teutonic women; fluffy sentimental Englishwomen, bearing
exile bravely, but thinking long for the Surrey downs; gravid Italian
women, clumsy in the body, sweet and wistful in the face; Argentines,
clouded with powder, liquid of eyes, on their lips a soft little down
that would in a few years be an abomination unto the Lord; women of
mixed breed, with the kink of Africa in their hair, or the golden tint
of the Indian in their skin. Good women! And yet.... For grace, for
coolness, for cleanliness, the venal Swedish girl outshone them all....

"Froken Hagen," Campbell said, "may I call on you some time?"