She smiled, then sighed.  The taking of life and the giving of it were mysteries to her.  She had never wittingly killed anything.

“Do you say that it doesn’t hurt the trout?” she asked.

“There are no nerves in the jaw muscles of a trout—­Hah!” as his rod twitched and swerved under water and his reel sang again.

And again she watched the performance, and once more turned her back.

“Let me try,” she said, when the coup-de-grace had been administered to a lusty, brilliant-tinted bulltrout.  And, rod in hand, she bent breathless and intent over the bushes, cautiously thrusting the tip through a thicket of mint.

She lost two fish, then hooked a third—­a small one; but when she lifted it gasping into the sunlight, she shivered and called to Selwyn: 

“Unhook it and throw it back!  I—­I simply can’t stand that!”

Splash! went the astonished trout; and she sighed her relief.

“There’s no doubt about it,” she said, “you and I certainly do belong to different species of the same genus; men and women are separate species.  Do you deny it?”

“I should hate to lose you that way,” he returned teasingly.

“Well, you can’t avoid it.  I gladly admit that woman is not too closely related to man.  We don’t like to kill things; it’s an ingrained distaste, not merely a matter of ethical philosophy.  You like to kill; and it’s a trait common also to children and other predatory animals.  Which fact,” she added airily, “convinces me of woman’s higher civilisation.”

“It would convince me, too,” he said, “if woman didn’t eat the things that man kills for her.”

“I know; isn’t it horrid!  Oh, dear, we’re neither of us very high in the scale yet—­particularly you.”

“Well, I’ve advanced some since the good old days when a man went wooing with a club,” he suggested.

“You may have.  But, anyway, you don’t go wooing.  As for man collectively, he has not progressed so very far,” she added demurely.  “As an example, that dreadful Draymore man actually hurt my wrist.”

Selwyn looked up quickly, a shade of frank annoyance on his face and a vision of the fat sybarite before his eyes.  He turned again to his fishing, but his shrug was more of a shudder than appeared to be complimentary to Percy Draymore.

She had divined, somehow, that it annoyed Selwyn to know that men had importuned her.  She had told him of her experience as innocently as she had told Nina, and with even less embarrassment.  But that had been long ago; and now, without any specific reason, she was not certain that she had acted wisely, although it always amused her to see Selwyn’s undisguised impatience whenever mention was made of such incidents.

So, to torment him, she said:  “Of course it is somewhat exciting to be asked to marry people—­rather agreeable than otherwise—­”

“What!”