ly charming. He wanted to justify this idea of her; he wanted
to talk of Mrs. Adair to Harris, not to learn more concerning her, but
just for the pleasure of speaking her name.

He was much upset at that, and the discovery that on meeting a woman
for the first time he still could be so boyishly and ingenuously moved
greatly pleased him. It was a most delightful secret. So he acted on
the principle that when a man immensely admires a woman and wishes to
conceal that fact from every one else he can best do so by declaring
his admiration in the frankest and most open manner. After the
tea-party, as Harris and himself sat in the consulate, he so expressed
himself.

"What an extraordinary nice girl," he exclaimed, "is that Mrs. Adair! I
had a long talk with her. She is most charming. However did a woman
like that come to be in a place like this?"

Judging from his manner, it seemed to Hemingway that at the mention of
Mrs. Adair's name he had found Harris mentally on guard, as though the
consul had guessed the question would come and had prepared for it.

"She just dropped in here one day," said Harris, "from no place in
particular. Personally, I always have thought from heaven."

"It's a good address," said Hemingway.

"It seems to suit her," the consul agreed. "Anyway, if she doesn't
come from there, that's where she's going--just on account of the good
she's done us while she's been here. She arrived four months ago with
a typewriting-machine and letters to me from our consuls in Cape Town
and Durban. She had done some typewriting for them. It seems that
after her husband died, which was a few months after they were married,
she learned to make her living by typewriting. She worked too hard and
broke down, and the doctor said she must go to hot countries, the
'hotter the better.' So she's worked her way half around the world
typewriting. She worked chiefly for her own consuls or for the
American commission houses. Sometimes she stayed a month, sometimes
only over one steamer day. But when she got here Lady Firth took such
a fancy to her that she made Sir George engage her as his private
secretary, and she's been here ever since."

In a community so small as was that of Zanzibar the white residents saw
one another every day, and within a week Hemingway had met Mrs. Adair
many times. He met her at dinner, at the British agency; he met her in
the country club, where the white exiles gathered for tea an