ike to
'andle one o' them little things meself."

And to this the third engineer, his greasy arms asprawl on the rail, had
looked over his shoulder and remarked:

"You! I'd like to see you! You'd pile her up on the beach before you'd
had her five minutes, that's what _you'd_ do."

It was a vile, gratuitous insult, the third officer had thought hotly,
and he had watched Mr. Spokesly do the only thing possible, walk grandly
away. That was the worst of those beastly engineers. If you gave them an
inch they'd take a mile. And he made a mental note of what _he_ would do
when he attained to command--some twenty years ahead.

But this was, I am glad to say, an exceptional incident. Circumstances
as a rule favoured the development of Mr. Spokesly's _amour propre_ and
he brooded with intense absorption upon his own greatness. Now this
greatness was a very intricate affair. It was inextricably tangled up
with the individual soul known as Reginald Spokesly, Esquire, of Thames
Road, Twickenham, England, and the unit of the Merchant Service known as
R. Spokesly, second officer, S. S. _Tanganyika_, a member of what is
called "the cloth." Perhaps it would be better to include another
manifestation of greatness, which was Mr. Spokesly's tremendous power
over women. His own explanation of this last phenomenon was that he
"kept them in their place." To him they were mere playthings of an idle
hour. Perhaps his desire was most aroused by stories of Oriental
domesticity, and he almost regretted not being born a pasha, where his
abilities as a woman tamer could have had more scope. However, he did
not read a great deal. In fact, he could hardly be said to read at all.
He patronized a book now and then by falling asleep over it.

In the early days of the war, Mr. Spokesly's light had been hidden for
some years in the Far East. Indeed, when I think of the sort of life he
was gradually subsiding into out there, I sometimes wonder if he would
ever have attained to such a capacity for moral effort as he afterwards
displayed unless the war had evoked the illusion that he ought to go
home and enlist, and so had opened to him the wealth of bargains to be
picked up in England. That, at any rate, had been his ostensible reason
for quitting the peculiar mixture of tropical languor and brisk
modernity which had been his life for nearly four years. Perhaps it was
not so much love of country as personal destiny, for Mr. Spokesly had a
very real beli