s true of all women that, however low one of them has fallen,
she preserves for ever within her a secret longing to be respected by
man. Whether Mrs. Armine shared this secret longing or not, one thing is
certain: her husband had respect for her, and she wore his respect like
a chain; Baroudi had not respect for her, and she wore his lack of
respect like a flower.

When she had visited the _Loulia_, reading, as women often do, the
character of a man in the things by which he has deliberately surrounded
himself, Mrs. Armine had grasped at once certain realities of him which,
in his intercourse with her, he was at no pains to conceal. Mingled with
his penetration, his easy subtlety, his hard lack of scruple, his
boldness that was smooth, and polished, and cool as bronze, there went a
naive crudity, a simplicity like that of a school-boy, an uncivilized
ingenuousness which was startling, and yet attractive, in its
unexpectedness. The man who had bought the cuckoo-clocks and the cheap
vases, who had set the gilded ball dancing upon the water of the
faskeeyeh, who had broken the dim harmony of the colours in his
resting-place by the introduction of that orange hue which seemed to
reflect certain fierce lights within his nature, walked hand-in-hand
with the shrewd money-maker, the determined pleasure-seeker, the sensual
dreamer, the acute diplomatist. The combination was piquant, though not
very unusual in the countries of the sun. It appealed to Mrs. Armine's
wayward love of novelty, it made her feel that despite her wide
experience of life in relation to men there still remained _terra
incognita_ on which she might set her feet. And though she did not care
particularly for children, and had never longed to have a child of her
own, she knew she would love occasionally to play with the child
enclosed in this man, to pet it, to laugh at it, to feel superior to it,
to feel tender over it, as the hardest woman can feel tender over that
which wakes in her woman's dual capacity for passion and for
motherliness. She both feared Baroudi and smiled, almost laughed, at
him; she both wondered at and saw through him. At one moment he was
transparent as glass to her view, at another he confronted her like rock
surrounded by the blackness of an impenetrable night. And he never cared
whether she was looking through the glass or whether she was staring,
baffled, at the rock.

Never, for one moment, did he seem to be self-conscious when he