"It is certainly very big," assented Guest, in a tone of colourless civility. Cornelia hated him for his indifference, his patronage, his thinly-veiled antagonism. She was accustomed to a surfeit of masculine attention, and cherished a complacent faith in her own fascinations. It was a new and disagreeable experience to meet a man who, so far from exhibiting the well-known symptoms of subjugation, was honestly anxious to avoid her society. To feel herself disliked; to be a bore to two men--the one eager to hand her over to his friend, the other furious at being so trapped--can the world contain a deeper degradation for feminine three-and-twenty? Cornelia's mood changed before it. The excitement which had tided her over the events of the afternoon died away, to be succeeded by a wave of sickening home-sickness. She was lonesome--she wanted her poppar! She hated this pokey place, and everyone in it. She guessed she'd take a cabin in the first boat and sail away home. ... Her lips quivered, and she blinked rapidly to suppress a threatening tear. She would rather shoot herself than cry before this patronising Englishman, but it was almost past endurance to play second fiddle all the afternoon, be snubbed on the way home, and look forward to an evening spent in propitiating two nervous old ladies! "I don't get any bou-quets in this play!" soliloquised Cornelia, sadly. "'Far's I can see, there isn't a soul in Great Britain that cares a dump about me at the present moment, except, maybe, Aunt Soph, and she'd like me a heap better at a distance!" She sighed involuntarily, and Captain Guest, watching her from beneath his lowered lids, was visited by an uncomfortable suspicion that while criticising another, his own behaviour had not been above reproach. Now that the girl had lost her aggressive air, and looked tired and sad, the feminine element made its appeal. Arrogance gave place to sympathy, prejudice to self-reproach. ... She was only a little thing after all, and as slim as a reed.