Sally smiled—­pleased—­at his violent antipathy.  “Don’t you think you’ll ever become one of them, then?” she asked.  “I expect you will.”

“No, not in fifty lifetimes.  Did she say I would?”

“She said she expected it.”

“Did she?  Well, I wouldn’t give a brass farthing for her expectations.  Just like her to say that.  I wonder what her game was.  I wonder did she think you could persuade me to it.”

He looked up at her; but Sally said nothing.  She could have told him—­told him to the letter what he wanted to know—­but she said nothing.  Then he asked her again why she had come that evening to see him.

“Is it anything to do with that parcel?” he asked suspiciously.

Her eyes turned to the little box in its wrapping of brown paper.  She reached out her hand and took it from the table.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Oh, the bracelet?”

“Yes.”

Her fingers attacked the knots on the string with half-hearted enthusiasm.

“Doesn’t it fit?” he questioned.

“Oh yes; it isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?  You don’t like it.  Here—­” he was growing impatient of her fingers’ futile attempts; “cut the string.  You’ll never untie those knots.  Here’s a knife.”  He handed her one from his pocket.  “You don’t like it, eh?” he repeated.

She looked straightly at him, eyes unmoved by the steady gaze in his.

“Do you really think that?” she asked.  “That I’m bringing it back because I don’t like it?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure.  But if not that, then why?”

There was irritation in his voice; he made little attempt to conceal it.  It was his imagination that he had come to dealings with the type of feather-brained woman who knows least of all what she wants when she gets it.  It may be seen from this that his knowledge of Sally was supremely slight.  He had a broad judgment for all women, a pigeon-hole in his mind into which he threw them without discrimination.  When, therefore, he came across the exception in Sally, he did not recognize her, flung her in with the rest, folded more carefully perhaps, tied even with a little distinguishing piece of ribbon.  But into that same receptacle in his mind she went, nevertheless.  Yet Traill was not without shrewdness in his wide judgment of the sex.  He could read his sister as you read a book in which the pages only need cutting, and the glossary sometimes referred to.

On this evening, certainly, he had failed to see the point towards which she drove; but in her dealings with another of her sex, a woman is most inexplicable of all to a man.  For this edition de luxe, he needs reference, dictionary, and magnifying glass, with a steady finger always to keep his place on the line should his eyes for one moment lift or wander from the print.

Sally, as yet, he had classified broadly.  In the very next moment he was to learn more of her, to take her down from that indiscriminating file in his mind, and scrutinize her afresh.