"
"I should not call you clever," said Robert Allitsen grimly.
"No," answered Bernardine pensively. "But I always did think myself
clever until I came here. Now I am beginning to know better. But it
is rather a shock, isn't it?"
"I have never experienced the shock," he said.
"Then you still think you are clever?" she asked.
"There is only one man my intellectual equal in Petershof, and he is
not here any more," he said gravely. "Now I come to remember, he died.
That is the worst of making friendships here; people die."
"Still, it is something to be left king of the intellectual world,"
said Bernardine. "I never thought of you in that light."
There was a sly smile about, her lips as she spoke, and there was the
ghost of a smile on the Disagreeable Man's face.
"Why do you talk with that horrid Swede?" he said suddenly. "He is a
wretched low foreigner. Have you heard some of his views?"
"Some of them," answered Bernardine cheerfully. "One of his views is
really amusing: that it is very rude of you to read the newspaper during
meal-time; and he asks if it is an English custom. I tell him it depends
entirely on the Englishman, and the Englishman's neighbour!"
So she too had her raps at him, but always in the kindest way.
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