THE KILLING OF THE GREY BEAR i8i 



enemy who finds them out and lunges for them, 

 leaving me to defend myself as best I can. 



I would have every woman a Beatrice — Oh, what a 

 big-game hunter was lost in Beatrice ! I don't mean 

 Dante's. She may have been insipid. I'm sure she 

 smelt of bread, of butter. 



All stood there with the wind blowing through his 

 ragged tscherkesska, looking ever so picturesque, and 

 besought us, us, not to cross the treacherous glacier, 

 for all the world as though we had never met a glacier 

 before. The biggest one in all the Caucasus is an 

 atom to the miles and miles of massed ice in the 

 Alaskan ranges. 



If I persisted in going over, said Ah, warningly — 

 clearly he thought me the most absurd of the two — 

 instant submersion would be my fate, as it would be 

 Cecily's to stand like Ariadne a-weeping on the shore. 

 It was so nice and flattering of him to choose our 

 company rather than our room that it crushed down 

 our feelings of rising superiority, and we feigned 

 complete ignorance of all to do with glaciers and their 

 ways. 



Very often when a woman is most ignorant with a 

 man she is at her cleverest. But I expect you know 

 that without my telling you ? 



Unsophisticated Ali took the trip in hand and 

 piloted us and taught us and directed us, and was so 

 happy and important and masculinely knowledgeable 

 that our uninformed state presently developed into 

 hopeless depths of illiteracy, which gave him a second 

 chance to teach us all the things we ought to know. 



