"You
call my _Akka_ things!"
"Well," said Larry, a bit taken aback, "what do you call them?"
"My _Akka_ are a _people_," she retorted. "As much a people as your race
or mine. They are good and loyal, and they have speech and arts, and
they slay not, save for food or to protect themselves. And I think
them beautiful, Larry, _beautiful_!" She stamped her foot. "And you call
them--_things_!"
Beautiful! These? Yet, after all, they were, in their grotesque
fashion. And to Lakla, surrounded by them, from babyhood, they were
not strange, at all. Why shouldn't she think them beautiful? The same
thought must have struck O'Keefe, for he flushed guiltily.
"I think them beautiful, too, Lakla," he said remorsefully. "It's my
not knowing your tongue too well that traps me. _Truly_, I think them
beautiful--I'd tell them so, if I knew their talk."
Lakla dimpled, laughed--spoke to the attendants in that strange speech
that was unquestionably a language; they bridled, looked at O'Keefe
with fantastic coquetry, cracked and boomed softly among themselves.
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