, or a big emerald, set in it
somewhere. She had had to sell most of her finest jewels when the bad
time had come in England.

"I must have a cigarette."

The coffee, the cigarette--they were both delicious. The warmth of the
atmosphere was like satin about her body. She heard a little soft sound.
An orange had dropped from a branch into the scarlet tangle of the
geraniums.

"Why don't you talk to me?" she said to Baroudi.

But she said it with a lazy indifference. Was her purpose beginning to
weaken in this morning made for dreaming, in this luxury of isolation
with the silent man who always watched her?

"Why should I talk to you? I am not like those who make a noise always
whether they have words within them that need to be spoken or not. What
do you wish me to say to you?" he answered.

"Well--"

She took up the palm-leaf fan which he had laid upon the table.

"Let me see!"

How should she get at him? What method was the best? Somehow she did not
feel inclined to be subtle with him. As she had powdered her face before
him so she could calmly have applied the kohl to her eyelids, and so
she could now be crude in speech with him. What a rest, what an almost
sensuous joy that was! And she had only just realized it, suddenly, very
thoroughly.

"What are you like?" she said. "I want to know."

She moved the fan gently, very languidly, to and fro.

"But you can tell me, because you can see me all the time, and I cannot
see myself unless I take the glass," he said.

"Not outside, Baroudi, inside."

She spoke rather as if to a child.

"The man who shows all that is in him to a woman is not a clever man."

"But clever men often do that, without knowing they are doing it."

"You are thinking of your Englishmen," he said, but apparently without
sarcasm.

She remembered their first conversation alone.

"The fine fellers--the rulers!" she said.

He did not answer her smile.

"Your Englishmen show what they are. They do not care to hide anything.
If any one does not like all they are, so much the worse for him. Let
him have a kick and no piastre. And to the women they are the same--no!
that is not true."

He checked himself.

"No; to the men they are men who are ready to kick, but to the women
they are boys. A woman takes a boy by the ear"--he put his left hand
over his head and took hold of his right ear by the top--"so, and leads
him where she pleases. So the woman leads the Englishman. But we are