She sat down and put her feet on the cushion.  Baroudi was instantly cross-legged on the rug.  Dressed as he was, in European clothes, he ought to have looked awkward, even ridiculous.  She said so to herself as she gazed down on him; and she knew that he was in the perfectly right posture, comfortable, at his ease, even—­somehow—­graceful.  And, as she knew it, she felt the mystery of his body of the East as sometimes she had felt the mystery of his mind.

“Will you take coffee after your ride?” he said.

“Yes.  Don’t get up.  I will pour it out, and give you yours.”

She did so, with the smiling grace that had affected Nigel, had even affected Meyer Isaacson.  She put up her veil, lifted the gilded case, looked at herself in the mirror steadily, critically, took the powder-puff and deftly used it.  She knew instinctively that Baroudi liked to see her do this.  When she was satisfied with her appearance she put the case down.

“It is charming,” she said, touching it as it lay near her cup.

“It is for you.”

“I will take it away this evening.”

She wished there was a big diamond, 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.”