"Why don't you talk to me?" she said to Baroudi.
But she said it with a lazy indifference. Was her purpose beginning to weaken in this morning made for dreaming, in this luxury of isolation with the silent man who always watched her?
"Why should I talk to you? I am not like those who make a noise always whether they have words within them that need to be spoken or not. What do you wish me to say to you?" he answered.
"Well--"
She took up the palm-leaf fan which he had laid upon the table.
"Let me see!"
How should she get at him? What method was the best? Somehow she did not feel inclined to be subtle with him. As she had powdered her face before him so she could calmly have applied the kohl to her eyelids, and so she could now be crude in speech with him. What a rest, what an almost sensuous joy that was! And she had only just realized it, suddenly, very thoroughly.
"What are you like?" she said. "I want to know."
She moved the fan gently, very languidly, to and fro.
"But you can tell me, because you can see me all the time, and I cannot see myself unless I take the glass," he said.
"Not outside, Baroudi, inside."
She spoke rather as if to a child.
"The man who shows all that is in him to a woman is not a clever man."
"But clever men often do that, without knowing they are doing it."
"You are thinking of your Englishmen," he said, but apparently without sarcasm.
She remembered their first conversation alone.
"The fine fellers--the rulers!" she said.
He did not answer her smile.
"Your Englishmen show what they are. They do not care to hide anything. If any one does not like all they are, so much the worse for him. Let him have a kick and no piastre. And to the women they are the same--no! that is not true."
He checked himself.
"No; to the men they are men who are ready to kick, but to the women they are boys. A woman takes a boy by the ear"--he put his left hand over his head and took hold of his right ear by the top--"so, and leads him where she pleases. So the woman leads the Englishman. But we are not like that."
She gazed at the brown hand that held the ear. How unnatural that action had seemed to her! Yet to him it was perfectly natural. Surely in everything he was the opposite of all that she was accustomed to. He took his hand away from his ear.