ter, if you had conclusively proved to Gritty that she was a sinner, she would merely have smiled with one of her odd grimaces, levelled her eyes at you, and said, "Well, dearie, what you going to do about it?" Womanhood had put a fine edge on her juvenile heartiness and it was the contrast that gave her her most piquant charm. She was too tender to be diabolic; too vulgar to be elvish; but her quality was both mischievous and elusive. She was a pagan, and a "fetching" one.
Out of regard for her companion's health, Gritty had foregone the sight-seeing trips arranged by Cook's man for two hundred "cruisers," as she called them, and had taken rooms at the Mena House, far away from the noisy city. There Paul found the pair on the eve of their departure to join the holiday ship, which was returning to America by way of Greece and Italy. He was to spend the night in the hotel.
"I just hate going," Gritty wailed, when the tea-things were taken away. Through the open window of her sitting-room she and Paul were watching groups seated at tables on the lawn. In the road beyond, a straggling party of tourists, trying to look as though camels were their customary means of locomotion, were ascending the hill towards the pyramids.
"I was plumb disgusted with those things," Gritty rambled on, "when we first come out here. They were so bare and hard, and I'd always thought of 'em in connection with moonlight and palm trees and Oriental music off-stage, like in a Sothern and Marlowe production of Antony and Cleopatra. When we motored across the Nile on a steel bridge I darn near bawled—honest I did. Naturally I thought it was gonna be Nile-green, like my new négligé! I felt like I'd been had. I could no more picture Cleopatra glidin' down that stream of cold tea than I could picture her crossin' to Hoboken from Thirty-Fourth Street. But since then the whole place's kind of
