She put aside her work and, leaning over the arm of the chair, her chin in her hands, looked at me gratefully. “I'm so glad you've said that. Dale can't understand it. He wants me to clear the trash away.” “Dale,” said I, “is young and impetuous. I am a battered old philosopher with one foot in the grave.” Quick moisture gathered in her eyes. “You hurt me,” she said. “You'll soon get well and strong again. You must!” “_Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut_,” I laughed. “_Eh bien, je le veux_,” she said with an odd expression in her eyes which burned golden. They fascinated me, held mine. For some seconds neither of us moved. Just consider the picture. There among the cushions of her chair she sprawled beneath the light of a shaded lamp on the further side, and in front of the leaping flames, a great, powerful, sinuous creature of sweeping curves, clad in a clinging brown dress, her head crowned with superb bronze hair, two warm arms bare to the elbow, at which the sleeve ended in coffee-coloured lace falling over the side of the chair, and her leopard eyes fixed on me. About her still hung the echo of her last words spoken in deep tones whose register belongs less to human habitations than to the jungle. And from her emanated like a captivating odour--but it was not an odour--a strange magnetic influence. I have done my best to write her down in my mind a commonplace, vulgar, good-natured mountebank. But I can do so no longer. There is something deep down in the soul of Lola Brandt which sets her apart from the kindly race of womankind; whether it is the devil or a touch of pre-Adamite splendour or an ancestral catamount, I make no attempt to determine. At any rate, she is too grand a creature to fritter her life away on a statistic-hunting and pheasant-shooting young Briton like Dale Kynnersley. He would never begin to understand her. I will save her from Dale for her own sake. All this, ladies and gentlemen, because her eyes fascinated me, and caused me to hold my breath, and made my heart beat. And will Captain Vauvenarde understand her? Of course he won't. But then he is her husband, and husbands are notoriously and _cum privilegio_ dunder-headed. I make no pretensions to understand her, but as I am neither her lover nor her husband it does not matter. She says nothing diabolical or eerie or fantastic or feline or pre-Adamite or uncanny or spiritual; and yet she _is_, in a queer, indescribable way, all these things.