her
own rifle."

In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women. They were pallid,
washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past middle-age. For him
women of any other type had ceased to exist. He had come to think of
every white woman as past middle-age, with a face wrinkled by the sun,
with hair bleached white by the sun, with eyes from which, through
gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had departed. He thought of them
as always wearing boots to protect their ankles from mosquitoes, and
army helmets.

When he came on deck for dinner, he saw a woman who looked as though she
was posing for a photograph by Reutlinger. She appeared to have stepped
to the deck directly from her electric victoria, and the Rue de la Paix.
She was tall, lithe, gracefully erect, with eyes of great loveliness,
and her hair brilliantly black, drawn, _a la_ Merode, across a broad,
fair forehead. She wore a gown and long coat of white lace, as delicate
as a bridal veil, and a hat with a flapping brim from which, in a
curtain, hung more lace. When she was pleased, she lifted her head and
the curtain rose, unmasking her lovely eyes. Around the white, bare
throat was a string of pearls. They had cost the lives of many
elephants.

Cuthbert, only a month from home, saw Madame Ducret just as she was--a
Parisienne, elegant, smart, _soigne_. He knew that on any night at
Madrid or d'Armenonville he might look upon twenty women of the same
charming type. They might lack that something this girl from Maxim's
possessed--the spirit that had caused her to follow her husband into the
depths of darkness. But outwardly, for show purposes, they were even as
she.

But to Everett she was no messenger from another world. She was unique.
To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain, she was
her entire sex personified. She was the one woman for whom he had always
sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the
one thing to be desired. Opposite, across the table, her husband, the
ex-wrestler, _chasseur d'Afrique_, elephant poacher, bulked large as an
ox. Men felt as well as saw his bigness. Captain Hardy deferred to him
on matters of trade. The purser deferred to him on questions of
administration. He answered them in his big way, with big thoughts, in
big figures. He was fifty years ahead of his time. He beheld the Congo
open to the world; in the forests where he had hunted elephants he
foresaw great "fact