She surrendered, I believe, on a day when she had thought to lure Jim
into her boat,--fatuously, for was I not a distinguishable figure in the
landscape? Her hopes must have been high, for she had but lately
repleted him with chicken-bones divinely crunchable, and then bestowed
upon him a charlotte russe, an unnatural taste for which she had
succeeded in teaching him.
With something of a swagger,--she swaggered in a rather starchy white
dress that day, and under a garden hat of broad rim,--she had enticed
him to the water's edge, so that I must have been nervous but for
knowing the dog through and through.
Her failure was so crushing, so swift, so entire, that for an instant I
almost failed to rejoice in her open humiliation. Seated in the boat,
oars poised, she invited Jim with soft speech and a smile that might
have moved an iron dog without occasioning any remark from me; but Jim,
noting, with one paw already in the boat, that I was not to be of the
party, turned quickly from her and came to me with his head down. His
informing and well-feathered tail signalled to Miss Lansdale that she
seemed to have forgotten herself.
At that moment, I think, the woman abandoned all her preposterous hopes;
then, too, I think, she learned the last and bitterest lesson which
great fighters must learn, to embellish defeat with an air of urbane
acceptance.
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