Nevertheless, she paused before replying.
Secretly, during all these days she was now considering, she had been as one who walks in a triumph. She had been exulting in the coup she had made just when her life seemed turning to greyness, exulting in the blow she had struck against a society which had despised her and cast her out. Exultation had coloured her days. Now suddenly, unexpectedly, she knew she had been living in a fool's paradise, into which Nigel had led her. And this knowledge fell, like a great shadow, over all the days in Egypt behind her, blotting out their sunshine, their gaiety, their glow.
"Pretty well," she said, at last. "Do you care about such things?"
He shrugged his mighty shoulders.
"Madame, I am not a tourist. What should I do in the temples among the bats, and in the tombs where one can almost smell the dead people? You must not come to us Egyptians for all that. You must go to the old English maidens--is that it?--maidens who wear helmets on their grey hair done so"--he put up his brown hands, and pretended to twist up a tiny top-knot at the back of his head--"and who stroke the heads of the dragomans sitting there at their feet, what they call their 'tootsicums,' and telling them thousands of lies. Or you must go to the thin antiquaries, with the red noses and the heads without any hair, who dig for mummies while their wives--ah, well I must not say that! But we Egyptians, we have other things to do than to go and stare at the Sphinx. We have always seen it. We know it is there, that it is not going to run away. So we prefer to enjoy our lives while we can, and not to trouble about it. Do you blame us?"
"No," she said. "I never blame any one for enjoying life."
There was in his look and manner, even in his attitude, a something that was almost like a carelessly veiled insolence. In a European she would perhaps have resented it. In him not only did she not resent it, but she was attracted by it. For it seemed to belong as of right to his great strength, his bold and direct good looks, which sprang to the eyes, his youth, and his Eastern blood. Such a man must feel often insolent, however carefully he might hide it. Why should he not show some grains of his truth to her?
"Nor for any way of enjoying life, madame?" he said.
And he leaned still a little more forward, put up one big hand to his cheek, let it drop down to his splendid throat, and kept the fingers inside his soft turn-down collar while he looked into her eyes.