It was not until the desperate woman had, in the terminology of Billy Durgin, been "baffled and beaten at every turn," that I could get into communication with her on a basis at all acceptable to a free-necked man. Having proved to the last resource of her ingenuity that Jim was more than human in his loyalty, she seemed disposed to admit, though grudgingly enough, that I myself might be not less than human to have won him so utterly. And thereafter I found it often practicable to associate with her on terms of apparent equality. She surrendered, I believe, on a day when she had thought to lure Jim into her boat,--fatuously, for was I not a distinguishable figure in the landscape? Her hopes must have been high, for she had but lately repleted him with chicken-bones divinely crunchable, and then bestowed upon him a charlotte russe, an unnatural taste for which she had succeeded in teaching him. With something of a swagger,--she swaggered in a rather starchy white dress that day, and under a garden hat of broad rim,--she had enticed him to the water's edge, so that I must have been nervous but for knowing the dog through and through. Her failure was so crushing, so swift, so entire, that for an instant I almost failed to rejoice in her open humiliation. Seated in the boat, oars poised, she invited Jim with soft speech and a smile that might have moved an iron dog without occasioning any remark from me; but Jim, noting, with one paw already in the boat, that I was not to be of the party, turned quickly from her and came to me with his head down. His informing and well-feathered tail signalled to Miss Lansdale that she seemed to have forgotten herself. At that moment, I think, the woman abandoned all her preposterous hopes; then, too, I think, she learned the last and bitterest lesson which great fighters must learn, to embellish defeat with an air of urbane acceptance. Miss Lansdale relaxed--she melted before my eyes to an aspect that no victor who knew his business could afford to despise. I clambered in. Jim followed, remarking amiably to the woman as he passed her on his way to the bow of the boat, "I _thought_ you couldn't have meant _that_!" And Defeat rowed Jim and me; rowed us past the feathered marge of green islands quite as if nothing had happened. But I knew it _had_ happened, for Miss Lansdale was so nearly human that I presently found myself thinking "Miss Kate" of her. She not only answered questions, but, what amazed me far more, she condescended to ask them now and then. To an observer we might have seemed to be holding speech of an actual friendliness--speech of the water and the day; of herself and the dog and a little of me.