E had not taken Cassy, into consideration when we invited the biologist, Gregory George, to motor with us into the Tunisian desert. Our wanting him to go at all we felt to be a sort of intellectual development on our part of which we were rather proud. As a rule, while idling through foreign countries we shun the erudite, and derive our enjoyment by sopping up understanding through the agency of the senses rather than through the cells of the brain.
Possibly several weeks of Cassy had given us a respect anew for brain cells, on the old theory—generally otherwise applied—that absence makes the heart grow fonder. If Cassy possesses a cell, it is yet to be unlocked, although, conforming to the law of compensation, this lack of equipment is cunningly concealed beneath a lovely exterior. And it is a melancholy fact that any girl who has looked about her a bit will admit such an arrangement to be an asset in life. However, we had forgotten the advantages of this specious pulchritude, or rather we had ceased to regard it as being marketable, and when we fully realized that Gregory would be thrown into close proximity with Cassy if he accepted our invitation, we saw very little ahead but several hundred miles of motoring misery for both our guests.
We would not have asked him at all had Cassy been with us when we three met, quite by chance, on the hill that once bore ancient Carthage on its bosom. The incompatibility would have been too easily apparent. But Cassy had declined Carthage a second time, as our first trip had revealed nothing to her but and tear-vases, "which were very sad things"; and as we strolled among the tombs of those who had themselves been denied the joys of biology, listening to Gregory's mildly explanatory voice, we suddenly yearned for more.
He did not at first accept our proposal, although we drove him straight away to the café at Sidi Bou Said, and he who can sit under the spell of that Moorish village and refuse any cup that is offered him of further Arabian delights has reduced life to a science indeed. Yet he admitted the temptation to let the world slide, and as he and the Illustrator touched upon their boyhood days and their climb up the beanstalk to manhood, they found that the science of life as the biologist knew it, and the science of living as the Illustrator had found it, were not dissimilar.
Even with this discovery fresh in our minds, a growing fear of what he would think of Cassy wrapped us in a penumbra of dishonor, and we begged him to declare himself before he would, perforce, encounter her. But some uncertainty of steamers deterred him until we reached Tunis, and there, as we expected, we encountered the child within a few feet of our hotel.
She was returning without guide from a shopping expedition, her arms full of red slippers, her eyes full of hair, and what was not in her eyes falling down her back. But Cassy was not troubled, she had bargained well that day; and impatient of the suggestion that we walk to the lily minaret rising from the kasbah for the call to prayers, she urged us to a brasserie, there to hear American airs played by Germans in a French band.
It was not entirely unpleasant to sit in a sort of magnified shop-window protected from Tunisian zephyrs, and watch the panorama of nations pass on the pavement below, and Cassy loved it. In a rush of emotion she bought a nosegay which, in a further, excess of sympathy, she gave to a blind beggar, save for one flower, and this she extracted for our astonished guest. Her general prodigality attracted to our table most of the turbaned venders of the town, and the apéritif hour took on the aspect of Donnybrook Fair. Her remarks were varied and unceasing, and as we watched the biologist endeavoring to follow her, our last hope of him as a traveling companion vanished.