‘Don’t see how you can possibly tell that,’ he said, standing over her, with his hand on the back of his wife’s chair; ‘and I don’t see that it matters--to you, at all events.’ ‘A perfect match,’ continued Isabel, pursuing her thought with no attention to Kingston--‘a perfect match--I suppose it is when neither husband nor wife is a match for the other. No, it doesn’t matter a bit. Only I am interested. I always am. I have only just arrived from the back of beyond, and yet I feel as if I had known you both--known you, at least, for half a dozen centuries. I can see all sorts of odd things in your mind--things that you have no idea of. You are quite naked to me as I look at you.’ Kingston conceived an instant red desire to shake and maltreat this insolent barbarian. ‘Are you coming in to tea?’ he asked, turning away as if to leave her. Isabel sat up in the long garden chair in which she had been lounging. ‘Stop,’ she said. Angrily, against his will, he stopped and turned towards her. Her voice compelled him. Unknown voices were answering her in his heart. ‘Well?’ he asked, trying to mitigate the animosity that surged within him, no less at her demeanour than at the power she exerted. ‘Don’t be so angry with me,’ she replied; ‘or don’t be angrier than you can help. I am a moral hooligan; I am quite irresponsible. So you need not think me more odious than I am. Honestly I mean no harm. But one must amuse one’s self.’ ‘Necessarily by annoying everyone else?’ asked Kingston as amiably as he could. ‘I don’t mean to,’ said Isabel; ‘nobody ever cared less about annoying people than I do.’ She rose swiftly, with a certain lithe splendour of movement. ‘Listen,’ she said in a new voice of seriousness, her eyes on a level with his: ‘I have an impulse. I will tell you the truth, as far as I can. Perhaps you think that what I say and do is simply bad manners and sheer native offensiveness. It isn’t that. It is that I don’t care--neither what happens, nor what I say, nor what anyone else in all the world may say or think or do. I don’t care a damn. Not a single solitary. I never have. And, of course, that simplifies conduct immensely, though I admit it may make one a little trying to live with at times. Do you understand?’