Astonished, not clearly understanding, she listened in absolute silence.  Never in all her life had she heard him speak in such a manner.  She could not make out whether bitterness lay under his light and easy speech, whether a maliciously perverse humour lurked there, whether it was some new mockery.

He said carelessly:  “I give what I receive.  And I have never received any very serious attention from anybody.  I’m only Duane Mallett, identified with the wealthy section of society you inhabit, the son of a wealthy man, who went abroad and dabbled in colour and who paints pictures of pretty women.  Everybody and the newspapers know me.  What I see of women is a polished coquetry that mirrors my fixed smirk; what I see of men is less interesting.”

He looked out through the dusk at the darkening water: 

“You say you are beginning to feel isolated.  Can anybody with any rudiment of intellect feel otherwise in the social environment you and I inhabit—­where distinction and inherited position count for absolutely nothing unless propped up by wealth—­where any ass is tolerated whose fortune and lineage pass inspection—­where there is no place for intelligence and talent, even when combined with breeding and lineage, unless you are properly ballasted with money enough to forget that you have any?”

He laughed.

“So you feel isolated?  I do, too.  And I’m going to get out.  I’m tired of decorating a set where the shuttle-cock of conversation is worn thin, frayed, ragged!  Where the battledore is fashionable scandal and the players half dead with ennui and their neighbour’s wives——­”

“Duane!”

“Oh, Lord, you’re a world-wise graduate at twenty-two!  Truth won’t shock you, more’s the pity....  As for the game—­I’m done with it; I can’t stand it.  The amusement I extract doesn’t pay.  Good God! and you wonder why I kiss a few of you for distraction’s sake, press a finger-tip or two, brush a waist with my sleeve!”

He laughed unpleasantly, and bent forward in the darkness, clasped hands hanging between his knees.

“Duane,” she said in astonishment, “what do you mean?  Are you trying to quarrel with me, just when, for the first time, something in this new forest country seemed to be drawing us together, making us the comrades we once were?”

“We’re too old to be comrades.  That’s book rubbish.  Men and women have nothing in common, intellectually, unless they’re in love.  For company, for straight conversation, for business, for sport, a man would rather be with men.  And either you and I are like everybody else or we’re going to really care for each other.  Not for your pretty face and figure, or for my grin, my six feet, and thin shanks; I can care for face and figure in any woman.  What’s the use of marrying for what you’ll scarcely notice in a month?...  If you are you, Geraldine, under all your attractive surface there’s something else which you have never given me.”