I accepted the compromise, and, dispossessing Adolphus, sat down again.  I certainly had made progress.  Feeling in a benevolent mood, I set forth the advantages she would reap by assuming her legal status; how at last she would shake the dust of Bohemia from off her feet, and instead of standing at the threshold like a disconsolate Peri, she would enter as a right the Paradise of Philistia which she craved; how her life would be one continual tea-party, and how, as her husband had doubtless by this time obtained his promotion, she would be authorised to adopt high and mighty airs in her relations with the wives of all the captains and lieutenants in the regiment.  She sighed and wondered whether she would like it, after all.

“Here in England I can say ‘damn’ as often as I choose.  I don’t say it very often, but sometimes I feel I must say it or explode.”

“There are its equivalents in French,” I suggested.

She laughed outright.  “Fancy my coming out with a sacre nom de Dieu in a French drawing-room!”

“Fancy you shouting ‘damn’ in an English one.”

“That’s true,” she said.  “I suppose drawing-rooms are the same all the world over.  I do try to talk like a lady—­at least, what I imagine they talk like, for I’ve never met one.”

“You see one every time you look in the glass,” said I.

Her olive face flushed.  “You mustn’t say such things to me if you don’t mean them.  I like to think all you say to me is true.”

“Why in the world,” I cried, “should you not be a lady?  You have the instincts of one.  How many of my fair friends in Mayfair and Belgravia would have made their drawing-rooms unspeakable just for the sake of not hurting the feelings of Anastasius Papadopoulos?”

She put aside her work and, leaning over the arm of the chair, her chin in her hands, looked at me gratefully.

“I’m so glad you’ve said that.  Dale can’t understand it.  He wants me to clear the trash away.”

“Dale,” said I, “is young and impetuous.  I am a battered old philosopher with one foot in the grave.”

Quick moisture gathered in her eyes.  “You hurt me,” she said.  “You’ll soon get well and strong again.  You must!”

“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” I laughed.

“Eh bien, je le veux,” she said with an odd expression in her eyes which burned golden.  They fascinated me, held mine.  For some seconds neither of us moved.  Just consider the picture.  There among the cushions of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful, sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow, at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me.  About her still hung the echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less to human habitations than to the jungle.  And from her emanated like a captivating odour—­but it was not an odour—­a strange magnetic influence.