now?"

"You'd be jolly sick if I didn't, wouldn't you, Vi, eh?"

"I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you're hideously conceited,
Fritz?"

She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.

"No more than any other Englishman that's worth his salt and ever does
any good in the world. I ain't a timid molly-coddle, if that's what you
mean."

He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek and yawned.
As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from self-consciousness,
as much a slave to every impulse born of passing physical sensation as a
wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.

"Otherwise life ain't worth tuppence," he added through his yawn.

Lady Holme sat looking at him for a moment in silence. She was really
irritated by his total lack of interest in what she wanted to interest in
him, irritated, too, because her curiosity remained unsatisfied. But that
abrupt look and action of absolutely unconscious animalism, chasing the
leeriness of the contented man's conceit, turned her to softness if not
to cheerfulness. She adored Fritz like that. His open-mouthed, gaping
yawn moved something in her to tenderness. She would have liked to kiss
him while he was yawning and to pass her hands over his short hair, which
was like a mat and grew as strongly as the hair which he shaved every
morning from his brown cheeks.