When she was pleased, she lifted her head and the curtain rose, unmasking her lovely eyes.Around the white, bare throat was a string of pearls.They had cost the lives of many elephants.
Cuthbert, only a month from home, saw Madame Ducret just as she was--a Parisienne, elegant, smart, soigne.He knew that on any night at Madrid or d'Armenonville he might look upon twenty women of the same charming type.They might lack that something this girl from Maxim's possessed--the spirit that had caused her to follow her husband into the depths of darkness.But outwardly, for show purposes, they were even as she.
But to Everett she was no messenger from another world.She was unique.To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain, she was her entire sex personified.She was the one woman for whom he had always sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the one thing to be desired.Opposite, across the table, her husband, the ex-wrestler, chasseur d'Afrique, elephant poacher, bulked large as an ox.Men felt as well as saw his bigness.Captain Hardy deferred to him on matters of trade.
The purser deferred to him on questions of administration.He answered them in his big way, with big thoughts, in big figures.
He was fifty years ahead of his time.He beheld the Congo open to the world; in the forests where he had hunted elephants he foresaw great "factories," mining camps, railroads, feeding gold and copper ore to the trunk line, from the Cape to Cairo.His ideas were the ideas of an empire-builder.But, while the others listened, fascinated, hypnotized, Everett saw only the woman, her eyes fixed on her husband, her fingers turning and twisting her diamond rings.