Her brown eyes were very dewy, and her throat was infinitely whiter than Peter's; she was all sinuous curves and melting harmonies of tint. And very good to look at, Stuart reflected,--if only she wouldn't describe the scenery!
"By the way, Nigger, are you aware that you've been sailing on the wrong jibe?"
"Didn't want to knock out my wife's brains."
Aureole looked up sharply: "You could have told me to move, couldn't you?"
A hot spurt of anger flushed Aureole's creaminess. "If Peter had been in the way of a jibe," she said in a carefully controlled voice, "Mr. Heron would have--sworn at her. He has sworn at her twice to-day."
"Heron's not a gentleman," decreed his friend, with unusual promptness of speech.
Stuart looked embarrassed. And Oliver became dimly aware that his wife was really enraged with him.
She burst forth: "You can't treat me in the spirit of equality, of give-and-take. No! I'm a petted little soft thing, who mustn't be inconvenienced or she'll cry; so you're chivalrous, and sail on the wrong jibe, and--and think yourself a fine fellow. You don't understand, do you, that there's nothing, no, nothing on earth I want so much as to be properly sworn at!"
"I'm sorry," he apologized for not having sufficiently damned her. As a result of a moment's consideration, he remarked placidly: "Blast you, Aureole, pass the mustard," with an air of having thus fulfilled all that was required of him.
Aureole did not pass the mustard. But said very quietly, in tones eloquent of suppressed meaning: "You will discover that it is not always wise to play the fool, _mon ami_!"... and an echo from a far-away world of shams and introspections and problem plays, mingled strangely with the impatient music overhead; for the wind, with the perversity of winds, had elected to blow fresh and hard from the instant they moored the boat; and like the crack of whips was the sound of the sail flapping against restraint.
"Wild-duck paste, Mrs. Strachey?" demanded Stuart, scattering her preoccupation.
If Oliver had apprehended a tithe of what lay beneath her reply, he would not have continued hammering so contentedly at the glass tongue.
"Wild duck.... Yes, indeed I will have wild duck."
"'Crosse and Blackwell's Wild Duck,'" Stuart read from the tin in passing it. "It has a pathetic tone, as if it were their pet, their only wild duck; the one that Crosse caught in the grounds with a butterfly net, and Blackwell pounded into paste, and Crosse wept and said he never loved a dear gazelle to glad him with its soft black eye----"