After a brooding silence, she spoke, her voice flat with icy determination. "I've decided to go with you."

"What?"

"I don't trust you to prevent this preposterous marriage. My sister is a child. Barely eighteen."

"My brother's only two years older."

"That's evidently old enough to lure an innocent girl into marriage in the hope of getting at her dowry."

"If anyone's guilty of setting traps, it certainly isn't my brother. He doesn't need your sister's paltry dowry. He owns a flourishing establishment in Cambo."

"I daren't think what kind of establishment."

"A hotel, if you must know. One of Cambo's best. It was my father's and my grandfather's before him. But my father died, and it was obvious that my talents ran more to the literary than the commercial, so we agreed that the hotel should be my brother's. He runs it with my mother."

"Your mother's in on this too, is she?"

"Now just a minute!"

"I'm going to Cambo, and that's final! I don't trust any of your wild clan of Basque brigands."

"I take offence at your— How did you know we're Basque?"

"Everyone in Cambo is Basque-except for the poor patients who go to take the waters and end up being tricked into marriage. Then too, there's the matter of your eyes."

"My eyes?"

"Yes, your eyes. Those notorious 'melting brown' Basque eyes that feature in so many cheap romantic novels."

"I know nothing of romantic novels."

"But my sister does. She devours them. And that's why I'm going to Cambo-les-Bains with you."

"Oh, you are, are you?"

"Yes, I am."

"How?"

"How?"

"Do you have a ticket?"

"Of course I have a— Well... no, actually. My brother has our tickets."

"Ah! Then how do you propose to get on the train?"

"Well, I'll just have to— Wait a minute. Youhave a ticket! For your sister."

"O-o-oh, no, you don't!"

"Oh, yes, I shall! And if you don't let me use her ticket, I'll follow you onto the platform, and I'll cry and sob and accuse you of... of running off with some tart and deserting me and our children! Our sevenchildren."

"You wouldn't dare."

She lifted her chin and regarded him coolly.

And he had the sinking realization that his adversary was not inhibited by the slightest sense of fair play.

"I'd do anything to save my sister from the fate worse than death: a bad marriage."

As though to punctuate this declaration, the carriage lurched to a stop, bringing them once again into a contact that had a brief physical-but only physical-resemblance to an embrace. The cab door was snatched open, and light from an ox-eye lantern flashed in their faces. "Train for Hendaye?" the porter asked. "You'd better hurry, m'sieur-'dame. They're closing the gates to the platform now."

The young man sprang out onto the pavement beside the impressive mass of the Gare d'Austerlitz. She descended, pointedly ignoring his proffered hand, as the porter seized two valises (the young woman's and her brother's) from the box of the cab and hastened into the station. They followed him to the turnstile, where the young man fumbled for the tickets for an eternal ten seconds before he found them in the first pocket he had checked. They slipped through the gates as they were closing, and they ran for all they were worth. She soon fell behind with a little cry of dismay, and he swore under his breath but he grasped her hand and drew her along behind him at a speed that not only cost her the last semblance of grace but even endangered her balance as they sped down the platform to where their porter stood beside the portable steps at the door of their car, making frantic signs for them to hasten. As they passed the dining car, the young woman glimpsed faces looking out upon their hectic race with expressions of unfeigned amusement blended with... something else, something that she would not identify until later, when recognition would make a tingle of embarrassment and outrage rush up the back of her neck into her hair.

With all the flair of gesture and oiliness of manner that mark the veteran tip-seeker, the steward showed them to their chambrette, deposited their valises in the racks, and turned up the gaslamp that displayed the 'new art' Guimard impulse to create foliage out of glass and metal. After the coin had been pressed into his hand and he had glanced down upon it with a thoroughly Gallic blend of resignation and disdain, the steward said that service in the dining car would begin in fifteen minutes, and he would make up their beds while they were dining. As he put his hand on the door handle to leave, he winked at the young man and tipped his head towards the young woman with a lift of the eyebrows.

She caught this yeasty, man-to-man communication in the mirror as she was taking off her Trilby fedora, and she spun around. Raising one hand to stay the steward's departure, she asked the young man, "Did you tip him?"

"Well... ah... yes, of course."

"Give me that tip," she ordered the steward.

The steward recoiled and stammered, "But, mam'selle, but... but..."

"Give it to me!" She held out her hand, and with a grimace of genuinely heartfelt pain, the steward turned his hand over and let the coin drop into her palm.

"Now get out of here! And if we push one of those buttons for a steward, you'd better not be the one who comes tapping at the door. Do you understand me?"

"But, mam'selle, I..."

"And what makes you so sure I'm a mademoiselle?"

"I'm terribly sorry, madame. I thought-"

"That's a lie. You've never had a thought in your life-other than filthy ones! Out. Out!"

The steward vanished, closing the door behind him with a thoroughly miffed click, followed by a defiant snap of his fingers, a dental mutter of outrage, an incensed extension of his neck, a petulant out thrust of his lower lip, and a disdainful flare of his nostrils, which catalogue of manly outrage he displayed only after he was sure he was safe from her.

"You were pretty hard on him," the young man said, not without a certain astonished respect.

"And you were pretty compliant. What did you think his little wink meant?"

"Oh, he didn't mean anything. Not really. That's just how men are."

"Exactly!"

"Well... after all..."

"What?"

"Well, what shouldhe think? You're young and attractive... in your way... and you're not wearing a wedding ring. And then there's the matter of your-"

"What makes you think I'm not wearing a wedding ring? I haven't taken my gloves off yet."

"No, but naturally I assumed... Are you? Married, I mean?"

"As it happens I am not. And then there's the matter of my... what?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"After that twaddle about my wedding ring, you said, 'And then there's the matter of your...' My what?"

"Well, your dress, to be frank."

"And what about my dress?"

"I will not be cross-questioned in that imperious tone."

"You shall! What about my dress?"

"Well, it's very... ah... modern."

"Modern?"

"Short, then. It's short. Short!"

"My dress comes to exactly three inches from the ground. I refuse to obey the dictates of fashion that oblige a woman to drag her dresses in the mud-and much worse than mud-just to assure men that her reputation is sufficiently unassailable to make her worthy of their attentions... attentions that are, of course, designed to urge her to do something that will damage her reputation."

"I wouldn't dream of denying any woman her right to wear what she wants to wear. But if a woman shows three inches of ankle to every passerby, then she must accept-"

"I accept nothing! And it's not three inches of ankle. It's three inches of tightly buttoned shoe."

"Ah, so you say. But when you stepped down from the cab, there was a bit of leg visible above the shoe."