“Don’t trouble, I will ring for Rose.”

“No need,” I growled, without turning my head, “I can find my hat in the hall by myself, after I’ve finished picking up . . . "

“Bear!”

I returned with the box and placed it on the divan near her.  She sat cross-legged, leaning back on her arms, in the blue shimmer of her embroidered robe and with the tawny halo of her unruly hair about her face which she raised to mine with an air of resignation.

“George, my friend,” she said, “we have no manners.”

“You would never have made a career at court, Dona Rita,” I observed.  “You are too impulsive.”

“This is not bad manners, that’s sheer insolence.  This has happened to you before.  If it happens again, as I can’t be expected to wrestle with a savage and desperate smuggler single-handed, I will go upstairs and lock myself in my room till you leave the house.  Why did you say this to me?”

“Oh, just for nothing, out of a full heart.”

“If your heart is full of things like that, then my dear friend, you had better take it out and give it to the crows.  No! you said that for the pleasure of appearing terrible.  And you see you are not terrible at all, you are rather amusing.  Go on, continue to be amusing.  Tell me something of what you heard from the lips of that aristocratic old lady who thinks that all men are equal and entitled to the pursuit of happiness.”

“I hardly remember now.  I heard something about the unworthiness of certain white geese out of stuffy drawing-rooms.  It sounds mad, but the lady knows exactly what she wants.  I also heard your praises sung.  I sat there like a fool not knowing what to say.”

“Why?  You might have joined in the singing.”

“I didn’t feel in the humour, because, don’t you see, I had been incidentally given to understand that I was an insignificant and superfluous person who had better get out of the way of serious people.”

“Ah, par example!”

“In a sense, you know, it was flattering; but for the moment it made me feel as if I had been offered a pot of mustard to sniff.”

She nodded with an amused air of understanding and I could see that she was interested.  “Anything more?” she asked, with a flash of radiant eagerness in all her person and bending slightly forward towards me.

“Oh, it’s hardly worth mentioning.  It was a sort of threat wrapped up, I believe, in genuine anxiety as to what might happen to my youthful insignificance.  If I hadn’t been rather on the alert just then I wouldn’t even have perceived the meaning.  But really an allusion to ‘hot Southern blood’ I could have only one meaning.  Of course I laughed at it, but only ‘pour l’honneur’ and to show I understood perfectly.  In reality it left me completely indifferent.”

Dona Rita looked very serious for a minute.

“Indifferent to the whole conversation?”