I flushed again hotly at this last word.  “Madam may discontinue the thought of my boyhood; I am older than she.  But if you ask me what I would do with a woman if I followed her, or if she followed me, then I shall tell you.  If I owned this place and all in it, I would tear down every picture from these walls, every silken cover from yonder couches!  I would rip out these walls and put back the ones that once were here!  You, Madam, should be taken out of luxury and daintiness—­”

“Go on!” She clapped her hands, for the first time kindling, and dropping her annoying air of patronizing me.  “Go on!  I like you now.  Tell me what Americans do with women that they love!  I have heard they are savages.”

“A house of logs far out in the countries that I know would do for you, Madam!” I went on hotly.  “You should forget the touch of silk and lace.  No neighbor you should know until I was willing.  Any man who followed you should meet me.  Until you loved me all you could, and said so, and proved it, I would wring your neck with my hands, if necessary, until you loved me!”

“Excellent!  What then?”

“Then, Madam the Baroness, I would in turn build you a palace, one of logs, and would make you a most excellent couch of the husks of corn.  You should cook at my fireplace, and for me!”

She smiled slowly past me, at me.  “Pray, be seated,” she said.  “You interest me.”

“It is late,” I reiterated.  “Come!  Must I do some of these things—­force you into obedience—­carry you away in a sack?  My master can not wait.”

“Don Yturrio of Mexico, on the other hand,” she mused, “promised me not violence, but more jewels.  Idiot!”

“Indeed!” I rejoined, in contempt.  “An American savage would give you but one gown, and that of your own weave; you could make it up as you liked.  But come, now; I have no more time to lose.”

“Ah, also, idiot!” she murmured.  “Do you not see that I must reclothe myself before I could go with you—­that is to say, if I choose to go with you?  Now, as I was saying, my ardent Mexican promises thus and so.  My lord of England—­ah, well, they may be pardoned.  Suppose I might listen to such suits—­might there not be some life for me—­some life with events?  On the other hand, what of interest could America offer?”

“I have told you what life America could give you.”

“I imagined men were but men, wherever found,” she went on; “but what you say interests me, I declare to you again.  A woman is a woman, too, I fancy.  She always wants one thing—­to be all the world to one man.”

“Quite true,” I answered.  “Better that than part of the world to one—­or two?  And the opposite of it is yet more true.  When a woman is all the world to a man, she despises him.”

“But yes, I should like that experience of being a cook in a cabin, and being bruised and broken and choked!” She smiled, lazily extending her flawless arms and looking down at them, at all of her splendid figure, as though in interested examination.  “I am alone so much—­so bored!” she went on.  “And Sir Richard Pakenham is so very, very fat.  Ah, God!  You can not guess how fat he is.  But you, you are not fat.”  She looked me over critically, to my great uneasiness.