She was, I took occasion to notice, aggressively pretty in that hot red and black style that finds its warmest admirers in a class cultivated above that to which she belonged; and she was scorning and flouting her slow, perplexed swain with that over-measure of vehemence characteristic of a sex devoid of the sense of proportion.

“Aw!” she was saying, as I came into focus of their dispute.  “That’s the moral of a mahn, it is.  Yer ter work when ye like an’ ter play when ye like, and the girls hahs ter sit and dangle their heels fer yer honours’ convenience.”

“I doan’t arlays get my likes, Jenny, or I shud a’ met you yesterday.”

“Ay, as yer promused.”

“We worked ower late pulling the lias, I tell yer.  ’Twould ‘a’ meant half a day’s wages garn if I’d com’, and theer, my dear, ’ud been reason for another delay in oor getting spliced.”

“You’re fine and vulgar, upon my word!  A little free, too, and a little mistook.  I’ve no mind ter get spliced, as yer carls it, wi’ a chap as cannot see’s way ter keep tryst.”

“Yer doan’t mean thart?”

“Doan’t I?  Yer’ll answer fer me in everything, ’t seems.  But yer’ve got enough ter answer fer yerself, Jack Curtice.  I’m none of the sort ter go or stay at anny mahn’s pleasure.  There’s kerps and dabs in the sea yet, Jack Curtice; and fatter ones ter fish fer, too.”

“But yer doan’t understand.”

“I understand my own vally; and that isn’t ter be kep’ drarging my toes on the Parade half an a’rtenoon fer a chap as thinks he be better engaged summer else.”

“And yer gone ter break wi’ me fer thart?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Curtice,” she said, and jerked her nose high and walked off.

Now here was an inconsistent jade, and I felt sorry and relieved for the sake of the young fellow.

He stood, after the manner of his kind, amazed and speechless.  Man’s saving faculty of logic was in him, but tongue-tied; and he could not express his intuitive recognition of the self-contradictory.  Such natures frequently make reason articulate through a blow—­a rough way of knocking her into shape, but commonly effectual.  Jack, however, was evidently a large gentle swain of the dumb-suffering type—­one of those unresisting leviathans of good-humour, upon whom a woman loves to vent that passion of the illogical which an antipathetic sex has vainly tried to laugh her out of conceit with.

I peered a little longer, and presently saw Mr. Curtice walk off in a state compound of bewilderment and abject depression.

This was the beginning to me of an interest apart from that which had brought me to King’s Cobb.  A real nutshell drama had usurped the place of that fictitious one that had as yet failed to mark an epoch by so much as a scratch.  I accepted the former as some solace for the intolerable wrong inflicted upon me by the sea and Miss Whiffle.

I happened across my unconscious friends fairly frequently after that my first introduction to them; so often, indeed, that, judged by what followed, it would almost seem as if Fate, desiring record of an incident in the lives of these two, had intentionally worked to discomfit me from a task more engrossing.