“I imagine Mr. Durnovo knows all about small-pox. We all do on this coast. He could hardly help recognising it in its earliest stage.” She turned on him with a smile which he remembered afterwards. At the moment he felt rather abashed, as if he had been caught in a very maze of untruths. He did not meet her eyes. It was a matter of pride with him that he was equal to any social emergency that might arise. He had always deemed himself capable of withholding from the whole questioning world anything that he might wish to withhold. But afterwards--later in his life--he remembered that look in Jocelyn Gordon's face. “Altogether,” she said, with a peculiar little contented laugh, “I think you cannot keep it up any longer. He ran away from you and left you to fight against it alone. All the same, it was--nice--of you to try and screen him. Very nice, but I do not think that I could have done it myself. I suppose it was--noble--and women cannot be noble.” “No, it was only expedient. The best way to take the world is to wring it dry--not to try and convert it and make it better, but to turn its vices to account. That method has the double advantage of serving one's purpose at the time, and standing as a warning later. The best way to cure vice is to turn it ruthlessly to one's own account. That is what we are doing with Durnovo. His little idiosyncrasies will turn in witness against him later on.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Your practice and your theory do not agree,” she said. There was a little pause; then she turned to him gravely. “Have you been vaccinated?” she asked. “In the days of my baptism, wherein I was made--” “No doubt,” she interrupted impatiently, “but since? Have you had it done lately?” “Just before I came away from England. My tailor urged it so strongly. He said that he had made outfits for many gents going to Africa, and they had all made their wills and been vaccinated. For reasons which are too painful to dwell upon in these pages I could not make a will, so I was enthusiastically vaccinated.” “And have you all the medicines you will require? Did you really want that quinine?” There was a practical, common-sense anxiety in the way she asked these questions which made him answer gravely. “All, thanks. We did not really want the quinine, but we can do with it. Oscard is our doctor; he is really very good. He looks it all up in a book, puts all the negative symptoms on one side, and the positive on the other--adds them all up, then deducts the smaller from the larger, and treats what is left of the patient accordingly.” She laughed, more with the view of pleasing him than from a real sense of the ludicrous. “I do not believe,” she said, “that you know the risks you are running into. Even in the short time that Maurice and I have been here we have learnt to treat the climate of Western Africa with a proper respect. We have known so many people who have--succumbed.”