And, as she said nothing, he resumed: "During the few minutes we have been accidentally thrown together, I have not seen a quiver of human humour in you. _There_ is the self-consciousness--the absorbed preoccupation with appearances." "What is there humourous in the situation?" she demanded, very pink. "Good Lord! What is there humourous in any situation if you don't make it so?" "I am not a humourist," she said. She sat in the bows, one closed hand propping her chin; and sometimes her clear eyes, harboring lightning, wandered toward him, sometimes toward the shore. "Suppose you continue to row," she said at last. "I'm doing you the honour of thinking about what you've said." He resumed the oars, still sitting facing her, and pushed the boat slowly forward; and, as they continued their progress in silence, her brooding glance wavered, at intervals, between him and the coast. "Haven't you _any_ normal human curiosity concerning me?" he asked so boyishly that, for a second, again from her eyes, two gay little demons seemed to peer out and laugh at him. But her lips were expressionless, and she only said: "I have no curiosity. Is that criminally abnormal?" "Yes; if it is true. Is it?" "I suppose it is too unflattering a truth for you to believe." She checked herself, looked up at him, hesitated. "It is _not_ absolutely true. It was at first. I am normally interested now. If you knew more about me you would very easily understand my lack of interest in people I pass; the habit of not permitting myself to be interested--the necessity of it. The art of indifference is far more easily acquired than the art of forgetting." "But surely," he said, "it can cost you no effort to forget me." "No, of course not." She looked at him, unsmiling: "It was the acquired habit of indifference in me which you mistook for--I think you mistook it for stupidity. Many do. Did you?" But the guilty amusement on his face answered her; she watched him silently for a while. "You are quite right in one way," she said; "an unconventional encounter like this has no significance--not enough to dignify it with any effort toward indifference. But until I began to reprove man in the abstract, I really had not very much interest in you as an individual." And, as he said nothing: "I might better have been in the beginning what you call 'human'--found the situation mildly amusing--and it _is_--though you don't know it! But"--she hesitated--"the acquired instinct operated automatically. I wish I had been more--human; I can be." She raised her eyes; and in them glimmered her first smile, faint, yet so charming a revelation that the surprise of it held him motionless at his oars. "Have I paid the tribute you claim?" she asked. "If I have, may I not go overboard at my convenience?" He did not answer. She laid both arms along the gunwales once more, balancing herself to rise.