"Living, rather than fortune, in my case, I'm afraid."
"Well, of course you don't need a fortune, you carry so much gold with you," and he glanced at her shining hair.
"Not negotiable, unluckily," she replied, taking his compliment as he had paid it, without a trace of self-consciousness.
"Like the sunlight," he answered. "In fact,"--confidentially--"I'm afraid you're a thief; you've imprisoned a piece of the sun, which should belong to us all. However, I'm not going to complain to the authorities, I like the result too much. You don't mind my saying that, do you?" he continued, sure that she did not. "You see, I'm a painter. Color means everything to me--that and form."
"One never minds hearing nice things, I think," she replied, with a frank smile. They were swinging up and down the windward deck, and as he talked he was acutely aware of her free movements beside him, and of the blow of her skirts to leeward. Her hair, too closely pinned to fly loose, yet seemed to spring from her forehead with the urge of pinioned wings. Life radiated from her, he thought, with a steady, upward flame--not fitfully, as with most people.
"And one doesn't mind questions, does one--from real people?" he continued. "I'm going to ask you lots more, and you may ask me as many as you like. I never talk to people unless they are worth talking to, and then I talk hard. Will you begin, or shall I? I have at least two hundred things to ask."
"It is my turn, though, I think." She accepted him on his own ground, with an open and natural friendliness.
"I have only one at the moment, which is, 'Why haven't we talked before?'" and she glanced with a quiet humorousness at the few unpromising samples of the second cabin who obstructed the windward deck.
"Oh, good for you!" he applauded, "aren't they loathly!"
"Oh, no, all right, only not stimulating--"
"And we are," he finished for her, "so that, obviously, your question has only one answer. We haven't talked before because I haven't seen you before, and I haven't seen you because I have been growling in my cabin--voilà tout!"
"Oh, never growl--it's such a waste of time," she answered. "You'll see, the second cabin isn't bad."
"It certainly isn't, _now_," rejoiced Stefan. "My turn for a question. Have you relatives, or are you, like myself, alone in the world?"