It Happened in Egypt

								

in order to escape all the professions and businesses your pastors and
masters proposed, and go your own way. Are ye at it still?"
"Rather! But you? I want to talk to you."
"Then don't do it in a loud voice, if you please, because, as you must
have realized, if you've taken time to think, I'm Mrs. Jones at
present."
"Why Jones?"
"Because Smith is engaged beforehand by too many people. Honestly,
without joking, I'm in danger here and everywhere, and it's a wicked,
selfish thing for me to come the way I have; but Rosamond Gilder is the
hardest girl to resist you ever saw, so I'm with her; and it's a long
history."
"Rosamond Gilder? What--the Cannon Princess, the Bertha Krupp of
America?"
"Yes, the 'Gilded Babe' that used to be wheeled about in a caged
perambulator guarded by detectives: the 'Gilded Bud' whose coming out
in society was called the Million Dollar D�but: now she's just had her
twenty-first birthday, and the Sunday Supplements have promoted her to
be the Golden Girl, alternating with the Gilded Rose, although she's
the simplest creature, really, with a tremendous sense of the
responsibility of her riches. Poor child! There she is, walking toward
us now, with those two young men. Of course, young men! Droves of young
men! She can't get away from them any more than she can from her money.
No, she's stopped to talk to Cleopatra."
"That tall, white girl Rosamond Gilder! Just before you came, I was
wondering who she was; and when you smiled at each other across the
deck it sprang into my mind that--that--"
"That what?"
"Oh, it seems stupid now."
"Give me a chance to judge, dear Duffer."
"Well, seeing you, and knowing--that is, it occurred to me you might be
travelling with--the daughter of--your late--"
"Good heavens, don't say any more! I've been frightened to death
somebody would get that brilliant notion in his head, especially as
Monny and her aunt came on board the Laconia only at Monaco. Esm�
O'Brien is in a convent school not thirty miles from there. But that's
the deepest secret. Poor Peter Gilder's fears for his millionaire
girl would be child's play to what might happen, before such a mistake
was found out if once it was made. That's just one of the hundred
reasons why it would be as safe for Monny Gilder to travel with a bomb
in her dressing-bag as to have me in her train of dependants. She
telegraphed to New York for me, because of a stupid thing I said in a
letter, about being lonely: though she pretends it would be too dull
journeying to such a romantic country alone with a mere aunt. And she
thinks I 'attract adventures.' It's only too true. But I couldn't
resist her. Nobody can. Why, the first time I ever saw Monny she'd cast
herself down in a mud-puddle, and was screaming and kicking because she
wanted to walk while one adoring father, one sycophantic governess and
two trained nurses wanted her to get into an automobile. That was on my