her baffled anguish, I think she could have taken a good close-range shot at the inscrutable nigger who had been with him, and had left him, and could not even bring us to his body. The girl on the stage to-night was like that, though you don’t believe it. Vague, indeed! Maude Lansing’s a fool if she keeps her on. “You see”--Chalmers shifted his position and, ever so little, his tone of voice. It was extraordinary how straight he went with his story, considering that he had never told it before. He seemed to have dragged it out from some receptacle, intact, not a thread frayed, in perfect order, ready to spread before me. The pattern was as clear as if it were just off the torturesome loom. He seemed to know it by heart. “You see”--he went on--“she had been changing steadily, all through that march of ours. You would have said that the tropical sun had forced her growth. She had been a cold, immature thing in Italy--passions dormant and sealed. Now they had worked their way up to the surface and were just beneath the skin. She _would_ have shot the nigger. Before, I suppose, she had lived with ideas only; even _he_ must have been chiefly an idea, though a tremendous one. The daily contact with all sorts of unsuspected facts, the hopeless crudeness of the hinterlands most of us never get into, had worked on her. There may be something subtle in the tropics--people talk as if there were. I should say they were no more subtle than the slums. The body demands a hundred things, and it becomes a matter of the utmost moment whether you get them for it or not. You can’t achieve subtlety until the body is lulled. That life has complications of its own; but I shouldn’t call it subtle. Very far from it. And savages make you feel that it’s subtlety enough merely to have a white skin; there’s something irrelevant and ignoble in pushing subtlety further. In the end the sun wears you out, I suppose, and makes you want nothing very much; but at first it merely makes it intolerable not to have everything on the very instant.... I merely meant to explain that she was a changed creature--a good sport always, but inclined to impatiences, angers, delights, and fervors that I fancy she had never felt before. Her tongue was loosed; she was lyric about cool water, violent about native trickeries. I don’t mean--Heaven forbid!--that she was vulgar. She had a sweet distinction all her own. She was merely real and varied and vital. And I dare say the fundamental formality of our relation was all the subtlety we could stand. It put an edge on everything.