ear a fez while smoking; but the sight of it gave me a cue. For
you must understand that, the normal Anglo-Saxon temperament, there is
necessarily something disturbing about such an attitude toward a woman.
Assuming the infatuation. And it occurred to me that herein lay the
source of an unidentified impression which he had made upon me as he
stood regarding the girl. And I saw as well the reason why she had
harped so on needing 'a friend.' I looked at the _tarbush_, glowing
bright red among the cedar-wood caskets and--yes, a _narghileh_ stood in
the corner behind, the amber mouth-piece thrust into the coils of its
own barbarically decorated tube. This man, for all his suave courtesy
and western polish, would be the inheritor of oriental ideas. His
attitude would be the attitude of the _pasha_ on his divan. He would not
understand my sentimental affection for Artemisia, or Florian Kelly's
panic-stricken rush from blind passion to a callous, worldly caution. In
short, he was equipped precisely as Florian Kelly said we ought to be
equipped before we embark upon an episode with such a woman. He had
wealth and he had wisdom, not only the wisdom of the world, but the
inherited sagacity of orientalized ancestors, the bearded owners of
extensive domestic establishments.

"Yes, he gave her absolute freedom, and demanded only absolute
obedience. I could not help wondering how Mrs. Evans would have regarded
such a proposition, and this led me to reflect that Jack's equipment was
too primitive, too simple. We Westerners do not seem to prosper in such
enterprises. We are hampered by our excessive idealism. Our training
does not fit us for the role of pasha. We are unable to compass the art
of intelligent infatuation. And I confess that at this close view of the
understructure of a polygamous career, I was weak enough to feel
scandalized. When she told me casually, as we sat at dinner, that Mr.
Kinaitsky had a fiancee, a rich young Jewess in Saloniki, my appetite
was affected. I felt that he was, well, a little beyond my range. Any
faint notions I may have had of experimenting in that direction myself
faded from view. Even the position of friend, of being a sort of deputy
_amant-de-coeur_, was fraught with grave danger to my emotional
stability. Very curious, I can assure you, to be suddenly apprised of
the extreme fragility of one's moral fibre!

"And the trouble with us is that we are usually unable to make out a
very strong case