“Bored?” snapped Barton.  Staring perplexedly into her dreary, meek little face, something deeper, something infinitely subtler than mere curiosity, wakened precipitately in his consciousness.  “For Heaven’s sake, Miss Edgarton!” he stammered.  “From the Arctic Ocean to the South Seas, if you’ve seen all the things that you must have seen, if you’ve done all the things that you must have done—­why should you look so bored?”

Flutteringly the girl’s eyes lifted and fell.  “Why, I’m bored, Mr. Barton,” drawled little Eve Edgarton, “I’m bored because—­I’m sick to death—­of seeing all the things I’ve seen.  I’m sick to death of—­doing all the things I’ve done.”  With little metallic snips of sound she concentrated herself and her scissors suddenly upon the mahogany-colored picture of a pianola.

“Well, what do you want?” quizzed Barton.

In a sullen, turgid sort of defiance the girl lifted her somber eyes to his.  “I want to stay home—­like other people—­and have a house,” she wailed.  “I want a house—­and—­the things that go with a house:  a cat, and the things that go with a cat; kittens, and the things that go with kittens; saucers of cream, and the things that go with saucers of cream; ice-chests, and—­and—­” Surprisingly into her languid, sing-song tone broke a sudden note of passion.  “Bah!” she snapped.  “Think of going all the way to India just to plunge your arms into the spooky, foamy Ganges and ‘make a wish’!  ‘What do you wish?’ asks Father, pleased-as a Chessy-puss.  Humph!  I wish it was the soap-suds in my own wash-tub!—­Or gallivanting down to British Guiana just to smell the great blowsy water-lilies in the canals!  I’d rather smell burned crackers in my own cook stove!”

“But you’ll surely have a house—­some time,” argued Barton with real sympathy.  Quite against all intention the girl’s unexpected emotion disturbed him a little.  “Every girl gets a house—­some time!” he insisted resolutely.

“N—­o, I don’t—­think so,” mused Eve Edgarton judicially.  “You see,” she explained with soft, slow deliberation, “you see, Mr. Barton, only people who live in houses know people who live in houses!  If you’re a nomad you meet—­only nomads!  Campers mate just naturally with campers, and ocean-travelers with ocean-travelers—­and red-velvet hotel-dwellers with red-velvet hotel-dwellers.  Oh, of course, if Mother had lived it might have been different,” she added a trifle more cheerfully.  “For, of course, if Mother had lived I should have been—­pretty,” she asserted calmly, “or interesting-looking, anyway.  Mother would surely have managed it—­somehow; and I should have had a lot of beaux—­young men beaux I mean, like you.  Father’s friends are all so gray!—­Oh, of course, I shall marry—­some time,” she continued evenly.  “Probably I’m going to marry the British consul at Nunko-Nono.  He’s a great friend of Father’s—­and he wants me to help him write a book on ’The Geologic Relationship of Melanesia to the Australian Continent’!”