frank
with each other, or we can be of no use to each other. After what has
happened many women might be inclined to avoid me as your wife did.
Fortunately I have so many friends who believe in me that I am in a
fairly strong position. I don't want to weaken that position on account
of Jimmy. Now, if you came to Buyukderer under an assumed name, I
couldn't introduce you to any one, or explain you without telling lies.
Gossip runs along the shores of the Bosporus like fire along a hayrick.
How can I be seen perpetually with a man whom I never introduce to any
of my friends, who isn't known at his own Embassy? Both for your own
sake and for mine we must be frank about the whole thing."

"But I never said I should come to Buyukderer," he said.

And there was a sort of dull, lifeless obstinacy in his voice.

"You have come to Constantinople and you will come to Buyukderer," she
replied quietly.

He looked at her across the room. The light was beginning to fade, but
still the awnings were drawn down beyond the windows, darkening
the large bare room. He saw her as a study in gray and white, with
colorless, unshining hair, a body so thin and flexible that it was
difficult to believe it contained nerves like a network of steel and
muscles capable of prolonged endurance, a face that was haggard in its
white beauty, eyes that looked enormous and fixed in the twilight. The
whole aspect of her was melancholy and determined, beautiful and yet
almost tragic. He felt upon him the listless yet imperative grasp which
he had first known in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room, the grasp which
resembled Stamboul's.

"I suppose I shall go to Buyukderer," he said slowly. "But I don't know
why you wish it."

"I have always liked you."

"Yes, I think you have."

"I don't care to see a man such as you are destroyed by a good woman."

He got up.

"No one is destroying me," he said, with a dull and hopeless defiance.

"Dion, don't misunderstand me. It wouldn't be strange if you thought I
bore your wife a grudge because she didn't care about knowing me. But,
honestly, I am indifferent to a great many things that most women fuss
about. I quite understood her reluctance. Directly I saw her I knew that
she had ideals, and that she expected all those who were intimately in
her life to live up to them. Instead of accepting the world as it has
been created, such women must go one better than the Creator (if there
is one), and invent an imaginar