Yet as you said yourself, it
was impossible for me to go away, so I had to stay. You wouldn't let me
go to Tulagi. You compelled me to force myself upon you. But I won't
buy in as partner with any one. I'll buy Pari-Sulay, but I'll put only
ten boys on it and clear slowly. Also, I'll invest in some old ketch and
take out a trading license. For that matter, I'll go recruiting on
Malaita."
She looked for protest, and found it in Sheldon's clenched hand and in
every line of his clean-cut face.
"Go ahead and say it," she challenged. "Please don't mind me. I'm--I'm
getting used to it, you know. Really I am."
"I wish I were a woman so as to tell you how preposterously insane and
impossible it is," he blurted out.
She surveyed him with deliberation, and said:
"Better than that, you are a man. So there is nothing to prevent your
telling me, for I demand to be considered as a man. I didn't come down
here to trail my woman's skirts over the Solomons. Please forget that I
am accidentally anything else than a man with a man's living to make."
Inwardly Sheldon fumed and fretted. Was she making game of him? Or did
there lurk in her the insidious unhealthfulness of unwomanliness? Or was
it merely a case of blank, staring, sentimental, idiotic innocence?
"I have told you," he began stiffly, "that recruiting on Malaita is
impossible for a woman, and that is all I care to say--or dare.
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