VIII

A WOMAN'S REASON

Elsa stared at the vacant doorway. She recognized only a sense of
bewilderment. This was not one of those childish flashes of rudeness
that had amused, annoyed and mystified her. She had hurt him. And
how? Her first explanation was instantly rejected as absurd,
impossible. They had known each other less than a fortnight. They had
exchanged opinions upon a thousand topics, but sentiment had had no
visible part in these encounters. They had been together three days on
the boat, and once he had taken tea with her in Rangoon. She could
find nothing save that she had been kind to him when he most needed
kindness, and that she had not been stupidly curious, only
sympathetically so. He interested her and held that interest because
he was a type unlike anything she had met outside the covers of a book.
He was so big and strong, and yet so boyish. He had given her visions
of the character which had carried his manhood through all these years
of strife and bitterness and temptation. And because of this she had
shown him that she had taken it for granted that whatever he had done
in the past had not put him beyond the pale of her friendship. There
had been no degrading entanglements, and women forgive or condone all
other transgressions.

And what had she just said or done to put that look of dumb agony in
his face? She swung impatiently from the rail. She hated abstruse
problems, and not the least of these was that which would confront her
when she returned to America. She began to promenade the deck, still
cluttered with luggage over which the Lascar stewards were moiling.
Many a glance followed the supple pleasing figure of the girl as she
passed round and round the deck. Other promenaders stepped aside or
permitted her to pass between. The resolute uplift of the chin, and
the staring dark eyes which saw but inner visions, impressed them with
the fact that it would be wiser to step aside voluntarily. There were
some, however, who considered that they had as much right to the deck
as she. Before them she would stop shortly, and as a current breaks
and passes each side of an immovable object, they, too, gave way.

The colonel fussed and fumed, and his three spinster charges drew their
pale lips into thinner paler lines.

"These Americans are impossible!"

"And it is scandalous the way the young women travel alone. One can
never tell what they are."

"Humph! Brag and