That fugitive glance confirmed the impression of recognition in her mind.  He was what she had expected in breeding and physique—­the type usually to be met with where the world can afford to take its leisure.

As he was not looking at her she ventured to continue her inspection, leaning back, and dropping her bare arm alongside, to trail her fingers through the sunlit water.

“Have we not rowed far enough?” she asked presently.  “This fog is apparently going to last forever.”

“Like your silence,” he said gaily.

Raising her eyes in displeasure she met his own frankly amused.

“Shall I tell you,” he asked, “exactly why I insisted on rowing you in?  I’m afraid”—­he glanced at her with the quick smile breaking again on his lips—­“I’m afraid you don’t care whether I tell you or not.  Do you?”

“If you ask me—­I really don’t,” she said.  “And, by the way, do you know that if you turned around properly and faced the stern you could make better progress with your oars?”

“By ‘better’ do you mean quicker progress?” he asked, so naively that she concluded he was a trifle stupid.  The best-looking ones were usually stupid.

“Yes, of course,” she said, impatient.  “It’s all very well to push a punt across a mill-pond that way, but it’s not treating the Atlantic with very much respect.”

“You were not particularly respectful toward the Atlantic Ocean when you started to swim across it.”

But again the echo of amusement in his voice found no response in her unsmiling silence.

He thought to himself:  “Is she a prude, or merely stupid!  The pity of it!—­with her eyes of a thinking goddess!—­and no ideas behind them!  What she understands is the commonplace.  Let us offer her the obvious.”

And, aloud, fatuously:  “This is a rarely beautiful scene—­”

“What?” crisply.

And feeling mildly wicked he continued: 

—­“Soft skies, a sea of Ionian azure; one might almost expect to see a triareme heading up yonder out of the south, festooned with the golden fleece.  This is just the sort of a scene for a triareme; don’t you think so?”

Her reply was the slightest possible nod.

He looked at her meanly amused: 

“It’s really very classical,” he said, “like the voyage of Ulysses; I,
Ulysses, you the water nymph Calypso, drifting in that golden ship of
Romance—­”

“Calypso was a land nymph,” she observed, absently, “if accuracy interests you as much as your monologue.”

Checked and surprised, he began to laugh at his own discomfiture; and she, elbow on the gunwale, small hand cupping her chin, watched him with an expressionless directness that very soon extinguished his amusement and left him awkward in the silence.

“I’ve tried my very best to be civil and agreeable,” he said after a moment.  “Is it really such an effort for you to talk to a man?”