"_You_ were not particularly respectful toward the Atlantic Ocean when you started to swim across it." But again the echo of amusement in his voice found no response in her unsmiling silence. He thought to himself: "Is she a prude, or merely stupid! The pity of it!--with her eyes of a thinking goddess!--and no ideas behind them! What she understands is the commonplace. Let us offer her the obvious." And, aloud, fatuously: "This is a rarely beautiful scene--" "What?" crisply. And feeling mildly wicked he continued: --"Soft skies, a sea of Ionian azure; one might almost expect to see a triareme heading up yonder out of the south, festooned with the golden fleece. This is just the sort of a scene for a triareme; don't you think so?" Her reply was the slightest possible nod. He looked at her meanly amused: "It's really very classical," he said, "like the voyage of Ulysses; I, Ulysses, you the water nymph Calypso, drifting in that golden ship of Romance--" "Calypso was a _land_ nymph," she observed, absently, "if accuracy interests you as much as your monologue." Checked and surprised, he began to laugh at his own discomfiture; and she, elbow on the gunwale, small hand cupping her chin, watched him with an expressionless directness that very soon extinguished his amusement and left him awkward in the silence. "I've tried my very best to be civil and agreeable," he said after a moment. "Is it really such an effort for you to talk to a man?" "Not if I am interested," she said quietly. He felt that his ears were growing red; she noticed it, too, and added: "I do not mean to be _too_ rude; and I am quite sure you do not either." "Of course not," he said; "only I couldn't help seeing the humour of romance in our ocean encounter. I think anybody would--except you--" "What?" The crisp, quick question which, with her, usually seemed like an exclamation, always startled him into temporary silence; then he began more carefully: "There was one chance in a million of your finding my boat in the fog. If you hadn't found it--" He shook his head. "And so I wish you might recognise in our encounter something amusing, humourous"--he looked cautiously at her--"even mildly romantic--ah--enough to--to--" "To what?" "Why--to say--to do something characteristically--ah--" "What?" "--Human!" he ventured--quite prepared to see her rise wrathfully and go overboard. Instead she remained motionless, those clear, disconcerting eyes fixed steadily on him. Once or twice he thought that her upper lip quivered; that some delicate demon of laughter was trying to look out at him under the lashes; but not a lid twitched; the vivid lips rested gravely upon each other. After a silence she said: "What is it, _human_, that you expect me to do? Flirt with you?" "Good Lord, no!" he said, stampeded. She was now paying him the compliment of her full attention; he felt the dubious flattery, although it slightly scared him.