animosity towards authority. He saw that authority can be made
exceedingly profitable to those who display dexterity and resilience in
dealing with it. Mr. Spokesly had associated long enough with Mr.
Dainopoulos, for example, to conceive a genuine admiration for that
gentleman's astute use of his position in the midst of diverse and
conflicting authorities. Mr. Dainopoulos might be said to be loaning the
Government the tackle to pull down the branches laden with fruit, and
then charging a high price for the privilege of putting that fruit into
his own pocket. Even the shipowners of England could teach him nothing
about profits. Indeed, later on, when the war was over, and he himself
was expeditiously disposing of his interests in ships, for he had known
wars before and the slumps that followed them, it was to those same
shipowners that he sold some of his most deplorable wrecks at the top of
the market, rather mystified at their blind eagerness to close with him
at any price. He was heard to say, on the Bourse at Alexandria, on that
always cool loggia where so many deals are consummated over coffee and
_granita_, "This will not last. You take my advice. Sell that ship of
yours to the English." And his dark-skinned companion, who had been
doing very well in the tobacco trade from the Piraeus and Saloniki, would
very likely sell, at a price that made him wonder if the English had
discovered a river of money somewhere. And both of them would continue
to sit there, fezzed and frock-coated, playing with their rosaries, and
discussing cautiously the outlook for Nilotic securities in the event of
the English withdrawing....

But that came later. Mr. Spokesly would have been even more impressed if
he had been aware of the ultimate destination of the freight he had been
stowing so industriously into the _Kalkis_, or of the total emoluments
accruing to Mr. Dainopoulos from that freight from first to last. The
old adage about turning your money over was not often so admirably
illustrated. Archy's absurd speculations and traffic in villainous drugs
seemed microscopic compared with the profits to be made by a good
business man. Which is perhaps one of the most embarrassing criticisms
of war in the modern sense, that it places a formidable premium upon the
sutlers and usurers, so that they now sit in high places, while the
youths of invincible courage are either rotting under wooden crosses in
France or looking for shabby situation