Woodhouse found secret amusement and delight in her racy nervous speech, in the dexterity of her idiom and patness of her characterizations. Here was a new sort of for him. Not the languid creature of studied suppression and feeble enthusiasm he had known, but a virile, vivid, sparkling woman of a new land, whose impulses were as unhindered as her speech was heterodox. She was a woman who worked for her living; that was a new type, too. Unafraid, she threw herself into the competition of a man's world; insensibly she prided herself on her ability to "make good"--expressive Americanism, that,--under any handicap. She was a woman with a "job"; Captain Woodhouse had never before met one such. Again, here was a woman who tried none of the stale arts and tricks of coquetry; no eyebrow strategy or maidenly simpering about Jane Gerson. Once sure Woodhouse was what she took him to be, a gentleman, the girl had established a frank basis of comradeship that took no reckoning of the age-old conventions of sex allure and sex defense. The unconventionality of their meeting weighed nothing with her. Equally there was not a hint of sophistication on the girl's part. So the afternoon sped, and when the sun dropped over the maze of spires and chimney pots that was Paris, each felt regret at parting. "To Egypt, yes," Woodhouse ruefully admitted. "A dreary deadly 'place in the sun' for me. To have met you, Miss Gerson; it has been delightful, quite." "I hope," the girl said, as Woodhouse handed her into a taxi, "I hope that _if_ that war comes it will find you still in Egypt, away from the firing-line." "Not a fair thing to wish for a man in the service," Woodhouse answered, laughing. "I may be more happy when I say my best wish for you is that _when_ the war comes it will find you a long way from Paris. Good-by, Miss Gerson, and good luck!" Captain Woodhouse stood, heels together and hat in hand, while her taxi trundled off, a farewell flash of brown eyes rewarding him for the military correctness of his courtesy. Then he hurried to another station to take a train--not for a Mediterranean port and distant Egypt, but for Berlin. CHAPTER II FROM THE WILHELMSTRASSE "It would be wiser to talk in German," the woman said. "In these times French or English speech in Berlin----" she finished, with a lifting of her shapely bare shoulders, sufficiently eloquent. The waiter speeded his task of refilling the man's glass and discreetly withdrew.