I had always been accounted a talkative man. One could read in her face that she had the wit to sparkle in conversation like champagne in cut glass, yet under the constraint that had settled over us, we labored as platitudinously as a knickerbockered boy and a school-girl entertaining her first caller.
"Billy says," she went on as graciously as though I had not rebuffed every conversational advance, "that you were shipwrecked in the south seas and wounded by savages."
"Billy!" My bruised consciousness flinched under the familiarity of the title and I fell back upon shameless churlishness.
"A nigger stuck me with a spear," I admitted shortly.
She glanced quickly up with perplexity. Her eyes seemed to read that I was not at heart a boor and her graciousness remained impervious to my ruffianism.
"I wish," she said slowly, "you would tell me about it, or are you one of the men who tell women only empty and pretty things?"
There was a vagrant hint of wistfulness in the tone of the question. I wondered if she had been fed, like the girl of our diary, too much on sweetmeats, and wanted a more nutritious fare.
"It wouldn't interest you," I apologized, melting at once to penitence. Then for a moment came a wild up-sweep of emotion. It was one of those impulses which master men and, when the trend is violent, make the eyes swim with blood and the hand rise to murder. With me it swept to sentiment, and carried me uncontrollably in its undertow.
"I wish," I said with an intensity which must have carried a note of wildness, "I wish to God I were back on that island now!"
The perplexed questioning of her eyes steadied me again into self-command.
"I crave your pardon," I said with a disingenuous laugh. "It's the call of the wild."
"Perhaps I understand something of that call," was her enigmatical reply.
I wondered. Could she understand? This woman with the perfect drawing-room poise; this creature of exquisite art? Even if I were absolutely free to tell her the whole story, from Suez to the Golden Gate, how much and how little would it mean to her? Could she comprehend a passion fired with no touch of the physical, painted horizon-wide against a canvas of cobalt sky? Perhaps not, but I wished as I had never wished any other thing that I might have been privileged to learn.