“I’m coming,” she said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Oh, yes, I am. Mayn’t I, Francis?”
“Why not stay in camp?”
“Not for anything,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss something like today for anything.”
When she left, Wilson was thinking, when she went off to cry, she seemed a hell of a fine woman. She seemed to understand, to realize, to be hurt for him and for herself and to know how things really stood. She is away for twenty minutes and now she is back, simply enamelled in that American female cruelty. They are the damnedest women. Really the damnedest.
“We’ll put on another show for you tomorrow,” Francis Macomber said.
“You’re not coming,” Wilson said.
“You’re very mistaken,” she told him. “And I want so to see you perform again. You were lovely this morning. That is if blowing things’heads off is lovely.”
“Here’s the lunch,” said Wilson. “You’re very merry, aren’t you?”
“Why not? I didn’t come out here to be dull.”
“Well, it hasn’t been dull,” Wilson said. He could see the boulders in the river and the high bank beyond with the trees and he remembered the morning.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s been charming. And tomorrow. You don’t know how I look forward to tomorrow.”
“That’s eland he’s offering you,” Wilson said.
“They’re the big cowy things that jump like hares, aren’t they?”
“I suppose that describes them,” Wilson said.
“It’s very good meat,” Macomber said.
“Did you shoot it, Francis?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“They’re not dangerous, are they?”
“Only if they fall on you,” Wilson told her.
“I’m so glad.”
