--which matched it so admirably. But Schehati was no connoisseur
of clothing, though a pretty shrewd judge of ways and manners, and he
summed up Jane thus: "Nice gentleman-lady! Give good backsheesh, and
not sit down halfway and say: `No top'! But real lady-gentleman! Give
backsheesh with kind face, and not send poor Arab to Assouan."

Jane was deeply tanned by the Eastern sun. Burning a splendid brown,
and enjoying the process, she had no need of veils or parasols; and her
strong eyes faced the golden light of the desert without the aid of
smoked glasses. She had once heard Garth remark that a sight which made
him feel really ill, was the back view of a woman in a motor-veil, and
Jane had laughingly agreed, for to her veils of any kind had always
seemed superfluous. The heavy coils of her brown hair never blew about
into fascinating little curls and wisps, but remained where, with a few
well-directed hairpins, she each morning solidly placed them.

Jane had never looked better than she did on this March day, standing
on the summit of the Great Pyramid. Strong, brown, and well-knit, a
reliable mind in a capable body, the undeniable plainness of her face
redeemed by its kindly expression of interest and enjoyment; her wide,
pleasant smile revealing her fine white teeth, witnesses to her perfect
soundness and health, within and without.

"Nice gentleman-lady," murmured Schehati again: and had Jane overheard
the remark it would not have offended her; for, though she held a
masculine woman only one degree less in abhorrence than an effeminate
man, she would have taken Schehati's compound noun as a tribute to the
fact that she was well-groomed and independent, knowing her own mind,
and, when she started out to go to a place, reaching it in the shortest
possible time, without fidget, fuss, or flurry. These three feminine
attributes were held in scorn by Jane, who knew herself so deeply
womanly that she could afford in minor ways to be frankly unfeminine.

The doctor's prescription had worked admirably. That look of falling to
pieces and ageing prematurely--a general dilapidation of mind and
body--which it had grieved and startled him to see in Jane as she sat
before him on the music-stool, was gone completely. She looked a calm,
pleasant thirty; ready to go happily on, year by year, towards an
equally agreeable and delightful forty; and not afraid of fifty, when
that time should come. Her clear eyes looked frankly out upon