Reading Women

Although for twenty-four hours he could see her in the cage alongside him, he had shown absolutely no interest in her presence. Thus when the great moment of introduction came we stood by with buckets of water, brushes, nets, and long sticks just in case the engagement party did not come off with the same romantic swing that one expects from reading women’s magazines. When all was ready, we opened the shutters and Nandy, looking thoroughly distrustful, sidled her way from the small cage into N’Pongo’s comparatively palatial quarters. There she put her back to the wall and squatted, her eyes darting to and fro with a curiously suspicious yet belligerent expression on her face. Now that she was actually in the cage with N’Pongo, who was sitting up on a branch, watching her with the same expression of uninterested mistrust that he reserved for some new item of diet, we could see that she was very much smaller than he—in fact, only about half his size. They sat steadily contemplating each other for some minutes, while we on the other side of the wire did hasty checks to make sure that all our buckets of water and so on were easily accessible ...»