XI

* * * * *

She left him without having lost any of her assurance or self-possession. He had an impression of a brown clean-cut face, narrow hips, stockings drawn tight over transparent ankles, a jumper which her bosom hardly stretched, and a scarf knotted round her neck and floating in the wind behind her.

But the deed giving up possession of the mines lay in the safe in the city, duly signed, sealed and delivered.

Lewis watched her through Lancaster Gate. She went into a large house, cream coloured like the others, with a built-out bay window through which he could see little mahogany tables covered with silver boxes and signed photographs. Lewis was not hungry. He wandered towards the Dutch garden which winter had hardly touched and which, thanks to the box hedges, kept its solemn lines, in keeping with the red and black brick architecture of the Palace which shelters the aged servants of the Crown. In the midst of the paved rectangle in this flowered cloister with its wistaria pergola, freed from the source of his torment, Lewis sat alone with a blackbird.

Everything encouraged him to live. The sun was tracing his majestic course; it was like Sicily. And he had got rid of a worrying piece of business.

Suddenly a cloud passed over the sun. The feeling of well-being left him. All at once Lewis felt he was seeing things as they really were. His destiny seemed to unfold itself before him.

"How cold it is now that she is gone," he thought, "how bored I am!"

Irene had revealed a great truth to him. He knew that the next time he saw her he would ask her to marry him.

THE next evening Lewis dined with the Apostolatoses in Bayswater.

A Gothic hall with elephant tusks and Italian cabinets made of ebony, from which the inlaid ivory bulged, loosened by the hot air from the heating apparatus; for the house was centrally heated: England was already far away.

In the drawing-room upholstered in cherry-coloured damask, on a uniform ground of crimson velvet, stood out black Khorasan enamels, minute GiordÃ¨s designs and delicate Sineh whorls. The drawing-room formed a kind of atrium surrounded by a balcony of polished wood from which hung Janina embroideries, Scutari velvets and huge mosque lamps decorated with cyphers in relief. Between the windows stood an Arab saddle in violet leather braided with gold, hung with all the weapons of an emir.

Other embroideries similar to those on the walls were displayed in glass cases, but these got older and older and became finer and finer, more difficult to see and more tiring to the eyes, going back to the period of Byzantine lace.

When Lewis arrived, the company, as they say in Russian novels, consisted of Irene and three other ladies, two of whom rose to their feet. These were the old cousins of Irene, the Misses Apostolatos. They stood one on each side of their paralytic old grandmother, a kind of moody NapolÃ©on, who, seated on a throne, followed the conversation with a vacant face but an alert eye from which her thoughts seemed to trickle. Beside her on the table was a half-finished game of patience.

Lewis expected that her three sons, the Old Jewry bankers, would be there, but none of them turned up. Sir Solon Apostolatos, the old father, came down at last in a velvet dinner jacket, preceded, as the Rhodes hangings over the door lifted, by a fiercely hooked nose kept in leash by the chain of his eyeglasses; he had bat ears, a close-cropped beard and protruding eyes like those of the gold masks of MycenÃ¦, and he wore a skull cap in the middle of his very scanty white hair.

In spite of his courteous greeting and the traditions of ancient Greek hospitality, Lewis summed him up as being mean, eccentric and a bully.

"Please accept my compliments," he said.

He pretended to be deaf to add to his authority. Irene offered him her slender cheek. He treated her harshly, as he did his daughters.

He made no allowance for youth, declared that everything easy or pleasant was wicked, upbraided his daughters for forgetting birthdays, for thinking themselves his equals and for living for nothing but pleasure, even though they were both over forty and lived like nuns. He also reproached them for being old maids, having done everything possible to prevent them from marrying; they surrounded him with fear, respect and admiration. He had once had a wife whom he killed by his bad treatment of her. With Oriental jealousy, when he had to leave her to go to the Bank he used to take down the unfortunate woman's hair and shut it in a chest of drawers, taking away the key.

They sat at an overburdened table round which an old butler carried out all sorts of funereal rites like those of the Orthodox Church, wandering about as they wander round the churches in Athens act Easter. In the centre of the table stood a bowl full of flowers whose object was not so much to decorate the table as to hide the guests from one another, thereby minimising the number of dreadful disputes and the threats of expulsion from the house that devastated the family dinner at every other course.

The food was plentiful. Oriental and heavy. But the old father, Solon, was only interested in the china on which it was served.

"And now," he said, addressing Lewis and rubbing himself to get the uric acid out of his joints, "you are going to have..."

Lewis waited expectantly for a tale of some noble vintage.

" ... my blue and gold Vincennes; there are only seventeen pieces left. Prince Vâ€”â€” has two and there are three at South Kensington; I have got the other twelve, which you see here."

There was no general conversation in honour of Lewis. The only subjects discussed were family affairs, baptismal names, charity, Greek politics; austerely formal discussions on liturgy, the size of Paschal candles and so on.

Then followed long silences in which one listened to the old man munching his anti-diabetic rusks.

Lewis remarked on the beauty of their pearls. Irene explained that uncle Solon had rushed into a mad whirl of expenditure when confronted by the fall of the drachma; inasmuch as he had been thrifty all his life ("Don't handle things too much," he said; "a gold coin disappears altogether in eight thousand years"), now, feeling in his old age that the end of all economy, patrimony and capitalism was approaching, he disdained the arbitrary value of post-war money and never stopped repeating, sometimes in a frenzy and sometimes light-heartedly, "Spend the money, my children, spend the money!"

And so, without wanting to, just because they were accustomed never to dispute this man's authority, the two sisters began to squander money, returning each evening tired out, having spent the day ransacking sales, stores and antique dealers' shops, and having changed their fortune into utterly useless articles.

At night they shut themselves into, and all light out of their rooms, put on a hundred thousand pounds worth of jewelry and sat and looked at themselves in the glass.

Uncle Solon was repeating himself.

"In three years' time the entire organization of the world will have changed."

He had two cruisers, costing two million pounds each, and a fortified villa for Venizelos with underground cellars built at his own expense for the "Cause."

"I don't want to offend you, uncle Solon," said Irene, taking the sort of liberty with him that her ancestors used to take with Jove, "but, personally, I think we ought to be more optimistic. I have given the Prefect of Athens ten thousand pounds to reconstruct the prison."

THEY went into the smoking-room, and whilst uncle Solon was plunging his arms up to the elbows into a mahogany cabinet full of cigars with his name on the bands, Lewis said:â€”

"I have a feeling that it was in the silence of a seraglio like this in Trieste that you strangled my poor little San Lucido venture."

"Ah I to my jealous lord let my poor head be borne."

"Don't make fun of this house," answered Irene; "I love it just as it is. I lived here as a girl; I was a day boarder at a Maida Vale school then, and I was captain of the hockey team. I used to come back here every evening when the fog begins to thicken and when the street singers cast fantastic shadows on the walls and smile behind their make-up. Yesterday I went up to my old room under the roof; it has been empty since I left it. My bed, a very hard one, where I used to weave ridiculous dreams, still stood in the corner."

"What sort of dreams?"

"I've forgotten now. There's a stuffed cuckoo which I brought back from Interlaken still there."

"I want to see it, this room of yours."

"Why?"

"Just because ..."

"Just as you like," said Irene simply, without waiting to be begged.

"I collect famous rooms," said Lewis. "I have already seen Cecil Rhodes' college rooms with his old cricket bat and his rhinoceros heads; Gaby Deslys' room in Knightsbridge after her death: there I found her old mother who had come from Marseilles too late, crying before a golden sun rising above a cream velvet bed; the ceiling was a painted sky in which aeroplanes were manÅ“uvring: they were all the different machines flown by the pilot who was her lover at that time.... And again, the bedroom of the Empress Zita at SchÅ“nbrunn, with her soap and towel just as she left them in her flight. But all this is quite beside the point...."

Irene's room was enamelled white with a green ribbon running along it like a water line, and two shiny chintz curtains covered with hollyhocks. It was what thirty years ago would have been called a symphony in white.

Lewis went up to her.

"You are still only a girl."

She stepped back.

"Let me alone."

Her nose twitched and her narrow nostrils dilated. Her brow, swept clear of the abundant hair that grew slightly over her temples, caught the light.

Lewis put his hands on her shoulders.

"I adore your prim face with all the romance lurking in it. Give me your hand. Open it. Look, there I am in the middle of your line of Fate; here I am again after climbing this mountain. You see: I've got to get there sometime...."

"I am always told that I've got a man's hand, the hand of a pioneer, the fingers of a banker, made to handle money; will you let me alone ..."

"Your slim figure, your long neck, your slender arms, your narrow waist..."

"Let me alone."

"Your honest mouth and your Byzantine eyes, like the eyes in a peacock's tail. I don't want you to be my mistress."

"Let me alone."

"Will you marry me?"

"Certainly not. I've been married once; that's enough for me."

"Irene, I think of nothing but you. I live only in expectation ..."

"Let me alone."

Lewis' hands began to make dark bracelets round Irene's wrists.

"I want to stay here with you. I can't leave you any more. I want to grovel at your feet.... Tell me ..."

"Let me alone."

"Let me destroy you, burn you down and build you up again."

They spoke hoarsely, in whispers; they were struggling now, forehead to forehead, like goats. Irene kept him at arm's length to prevent him from "clinching."

At first he had made an effort not to throw himself on her, feeling that for once this was not the right way. But from force of habit he let himself go.

In falling they sank on to the bed. An English bed, that is to say a bench made of stone. Irene tightened her limbs and crossed one foot over the other for safety.

"Let me alone."

Lewis knelt on her with all his weight; the fabric of Irene's chemise tore in his hand; their hearts beat together. Their faces were red from being rubbed together so much. Lewis held one of the girl's hands behind her back and kept the other motionless beneath her chin; hairpins rained; the blue ribbons of her chemise slid off her shoulders.

"Let me alone, you're killing me!"

She gave such a cry that he got up, a thing he had never done before for any woman.

"Forgive me," he said.

They were both out of breath, like boxers during an interval. Irene shook out her hair and put it up again; her whole face shone from the frame of her thick mane, which looked as if it was modelled in lead: it altered her whole being: she was even more her own self.

"Naturally," said Lewis, "we shall never meet again after this."

"Why not? I'm not frightened of you."

She was bubbling over with emotion.

"You're not frightened either of telling me that you are attracted to me a little?"

"No."

"You're not angry with me?"

"I'm angry with myself for standing here calmly like this."

"Cut your hair off."

"Never."

"For the last time.... Don't you agree that we ought to be partners in the same firm?"

Irene smiled.

"No. Anything but that. Say good-night nicely like an Englishman and go."

Lewis saw before him the abyss of the staircase. He took a few steps and then with French impudence he turned and said:â€”

"I hate going like this. Give me something to take away, something that belongs to you. Not a handkerchief, it's unlucky. I know, give me your camisole. I'll keep it in my pocket book in memory of you."

She looked at him in bewilderment. She had never met a man like him before.

"At least tell me of someone in Paris who loves you and knows you well, to whom I can talk about you."

"I don't know anyone in Paris."

"Well, then, promise me one thing, before going back to Trieste you will ring me up ... SÃ©gur 5555. It's quite easy to remember."

With flaming cheeks and steady eyes Irene stood on the landing and signed to him that she did not want to talk any more.

She watched Lewis go down the stairs.

WINTRY weather, with warm mists, good weather for the reawakening of the larger saurians. Mauve arc lamps throwing their beams on the asphalt, like lamps in recessed bedsteads shining on the sheets. The omnibuses steeped their headlights in the wood block roadway as in some deep canal.

He struck the Thames at Victoria Embankment, along which the tramway cars, bearing up from the suburbs vegetable smells and dead leaves caught in their trolley wheels, ran with great shrieking violin notes that made one shudder like the playing of a Jewish virtuoso. In the middle of the river, their noses to the tide, the barges slumbered lethargically, like sombre prehistoric animals in the silvery stream. Cleopatra's needle, whose proud erection tapered off into the fog, was balanced on the opposite side of the river by the pylon of Lipton's warehouse.

Lewis looked at Big Ben to see the time. He saw the Houses of Parliament, that Gothic prison from which all modern liberty has sprung. It was nearly midnight, the two hands being almost at the present arms. Suddenly he remembered that the Continental boat train left in twenty-five minutes. After all, what more had he to do in London?

He went to his hotel, had his luggage brought down, and caught the train without having had time to change his clothes.

The Boulogne fishing smacks leaving the harbour before dawn, their sails filled by the gentle breeze that precedes sunrise and with big fires on their bridges which threw huge shadows of the fishermen on to the sails, saw, not without some surprise, a passenger in dress clothes leaning over the prow of the steamer and towering above the spray with his silk hat.

Lewis had completely forgotten Irene.

As each wave broke Lewis thought of Irene.

IT is one of the great advantages of travel that one always gains forty-eight hours before and eight days afterwards by not telling anyone that one has started or returned.

Lewis did not go near Madame Magnac. He worked all day and stayed at home every evening in the hope that Irene would ring him up.

One evening, towards midnight, he had turned out the light and was thinking of her, far away, cut off from him by the sea, and yet, in this room with him (she was in his arms, he was holding her so closely that her breasts were crushed together), when the telephone bell rang. It was like a pistol shot fired beneath his pillow.

It might be Elsie Magnac. He unhooked the receiver and suddenly Irene was close to him, seemed to be sitting at the foot of his bed in the dark: she had telephoned to him whilst he was invoking her, waking him up, and taking advantage of his sleepiness to break his solitude and to insinuate herself into one of those dark corners into which one's daily worries retreat subconsciously during the night.

"Have you been thinking of me, Irene?"

She answered in a low constrained voice:â€”

"Of course."

She seemed so close that he could almost feel her breath. It left her lips in front of her words; in a tenth of a second it crossed the earth, as dead must talk to dead, coming across the rich soil land of Kent, over Dover Castle, beneath the chalky sea, up the Boulogne sands, along the capricious windings of the Seine, over the roofs of Paris, right up to Lewis' right ear. Lewis was struck with the clearness with which one heard at night, without any roaring or buzzing. The words she spoke seemed fluid, unaffected by distance, and charged with meaning. Lewis wanted to talk to her like a friend, but he found that he only knew her well enough to call her endearing names.

"I am quite close to you, Irene."

That was all. They were cut off. The tragi-comedy of French administration intervened. A young woman with a dry telephonic voice asked him what his number was; then a man with a southern accent and the voice of a policeman, apparently talking from the middle of a parrot house, asked him who was calling him from London; to which he could find no answer.

A few minutes later Irene got through again.

"I've got nothing more to say," she said, "have you?"

"Nor have I. I love you."

The words rang emptily on the edge of the mouthpiece. Lewis felt, however, that at the other side of the Channel his words had struck home.

"No," she said, and hung up the receiver.

"Either the telephone or the distance spoils her voice," thought Lewis, "making it sound serious and taking away its charm." (Hitherto the voices that woke him up at night rang with silvery laughter, merry voices, saying, "Good morning, you"; younger voices, the staccato or husky voices of little Paris ladies.) But this voice was that of a good woman.

As Lewis was musing in the darkness of his room on the conversation which had just taken place, already finding it difficult to remember it all, so far off did it seem, almost like a conversation in a dream, the telephone bell rang sharply; it was Madame Magnac.

"My dear boy, I am glad to hear you are back. I suppose you're off again soon; all your business seems to take you so far away."

"Off again? Never, now that I have heard your voice," said Lewis.

"It is the last time you will have that enchanting pleasure," replied Madame Magnac, disdainfully. "Foreign calls always have priority. Good-bye."

After which Lewis found himself alone again.

FOR a moment he wondered if he was going to feel hurt about it, then, as nothing of the kind happened, he leapt with joy, and his spring mattress bounced him up to the ceiling. He took his address book, his private letters, even the little red notebook, and burnt them all. A feeling of youth and self-confidence came over him, and in the silence of the small hours, gave him a glimpse of a new life in which he would be more free than he had ever been. He would be able to live quite a different life to that made up of days strung together by artificiality. An entirely new relationship with the world was unfolding itself. Irene must be his.

He opened the window. A black cat was crossing the grass plot. Factory hooters sounded in the suburbs. Lewis did not want to be alone; he dressed and went out. A lorry passed, loaded with carrots. He jumped on behind as he used to do as a boy when he went to school, in spite of severe admonitions. Dangling his legs and gnawing carrots, he crossed Paris by tortuous streets, empty save for milk cans, and never stopped till he reached the banks of the Saint-Martin canal, with its towpaths and little low houses like a Flemish port. In order to assert itself, already triumphing over the night, the light neglected nothing that it could reach, especially all the smoothest parts of the landscape, the water of the canal, the stone quays, the iron sides of the tugs. Through the idle lock gates trickled a gentle gilded grey stream of water, whose colour was not reflected from any glow in the east. The huge mass of the warehouses was mirrored in the deep crimson waters of the canal. In the holds of the barges could be heard the stamping of mules eager to resume the towpath.

Things looked so simple and natural, neither fresh nor tired, fulfilling their destinies and working towards the common end. Huge barges with their cargoes of Belgian goods slept on the deep water.

After drinking a glass of white wine, Lewis walked about waiting for the day to break and for the shutters to come down at the big Post Office in the Rue du Louvre. Then he went in and composed a reply-paid telegram to Irene on the steps. He explained that his life was over unless she would be his wife.

Then he went home, took the receiver off the telephone, drew the curtains and waited in the darkness, lying on his bed.

At midday a telegram was brought to him. He held it in his hands for a while without opening it, then pushed it under his bolster, laid it on his knees, on a chair, on the mantlepiece. At last, towards evening, he found he had enjoyed the excitement long enough. He read:â€”

LONDON.Â Â Â 22.11.22.Â Â Â 14331 A.

Let's try.

Irene.

"IRENE, I've got a present for you," said Lewis.

"What is it?"

"I am going to give you my freedom. I am leaving the Franco-African. Are you surprised, like everyone else? It is quite impossible to do two things well at the same time, and I have decided to love you to perfection. That will take up all my time."

"It's a dangerous outlook for me," replied Irene. "Imagine my anxiety."

"Since you are my wife ..."

"Considering the length of the journey, you are hurrying too much at the start. You must be wary."

"No. For once in your life you have found a Frenchman who is not prudent and acts without thinking of to-morrow, and you give him no encouragement. Don't think too much of me for it; it is no sacrifice for me. We live in an age when things leave us long before we leave them. I know quite well when I shall tire of happiness, but I never know when happiness will be tired of me: it took me by surprise; so I cling to it. I can easily live without doing anything; I was brought up in England. Why is it that French people always think that when a statesman is no longer in office, when an author's books no longer appear in the shop windows, or a business man neglects his office, he is going to die? Besides, it isn't as if I were going to retire into the desert. On the contrary, you know that I am at last emerging from my solitude."

"Which is preparation for boredom."

"No, for bliss. In spite of appearances, I was a lonely man, that is to say a caveman, supremely selfish, hunting for his daily food, just enough for himself. I regret it now. I've written a very tactful letter to my Board of Directors, and I've got a year's holiday. As to the Company, I just asked them to let me retire into your arms. Besides, what am I leaving?"

"Don't break with anything, Lewis, believe me. Life is better without shocks. You will soon regret your work and even your friends."

"I have passed the age for having friends. By now they have all met the woman they were meant to meet. You know what women think of friendship between men: it puts them in the shade. As for work ... I have never worked. Modern business isn't work, it's plunder. I was going headlong into old age with that over-agitation and lack of activity which are typical of the present day. So far from being diminished, my resources have increased since I've had you. I am learning to become human. My first need is to adore you."

"Mine is to yield to you," answered Irene, "even though you are listless and frivolous ... but I don't regret my foolishness any more. I need you now that I have cut adrift from everything. You are my nearest relation."

From the moment Irene agreed to marry a foreigner and to leave Trieste, she also broke the bonds that tied her to her bank, her business life being only an extension of her family life; without one the other became impossible. There is no place for dreams in the counting-house homes of Greek bankers. The unexpressed devotion, the professional admiration, and the fraternal attachment which her two Apostolatos cousins had for her behind the granite walls of the Trieste mansion, in a strange atmosphere of strong room and harem, rendered precarious any form of compromise, at which, besides, she knew that she herself would never have been able to stop. Having built up her life on a basis of freedom, she considered that she had a right (without realizing how impatient she was to do so) to renounce it again.

There they both were, blissful, useless, a prey to a public happiness, depending on one another as much as offer and acceptance do. They remained suspended by a single thread above the pit dug by themselves, and they rejoiced in their danger.

What was to be done now with their victory? Save when they dressed (and in the peculiar vagrancy of dreams) they never knew a moment's solitude. There was nothing unexpected or thrilling between them, nor any room for jealousy. They belonged to each other in the most difficult of all lighting: that of happiness.

As though that were not enough they chose to leave the West and to go to Greece.

"I COME from Lâ€”â€” one of the northern Sporades. No, it is too small, you will only find it on German maps. I've got a marble cottage there. Don't be alarmed. It is deserted. Nobody will call on us."

They had embarked at the Galata bridge the day before, on leaving the train. A forbidding rain-swept landscape. The cupolas of the mosques were like big water-logged balloons which were unable to rise; every year the Pera sky-scrapers increase in number and add to the general depression; the river steamboats belch out clouds of Heraklian coal which grits between one's teeth, and dreary Scythian mists creep up from the Black Sea along the leaden Bosphorous. The driving rain soaked the houses of Scutari, turning their silver grey wood black.

"In Turkey," said Irene, "it always rains."

"I suppose if the Greeks had come back to Constantinople the weather would have changed completely."

Lewis tried to tease her, but she refused to see any humour in it, concentrating in herself the undying hatred of Greek for Turk.

"You French people, with your literary flirtations with Turkey and your blindness to her infidelities, are quite intolerable. Haven't you understood the lesson of the war?" And Irene pointed with her finger to theGoeben, a worn-out, unkempt hulk, but alive once more in front of the Old Seraglio.

"But I'm not standing up for the Turks."

"Yes, you are."

"I'm not."

Irene heaved "one of those Greek sighs that make the Bosphorous tremble," as Byron says.

Their boat did not leave till after breakfast. They went up to Saint Sophia; at the gate of the mosque a sentry, before letting them in, asked them whether they were Greeks or Armenians.

"I am a Greek subject," answered Irene proudly.

The Turk barred the way ferociously, and Lewis had to produce Irene's new French passport.

"To think that we so nearly came back, we who are the guardians of Christianity in the East, and that these fanatical, besotted, dishonest Turks, who never knew how to do anything but massacre, are still here. They want to get rid of all Greeks from Constantinople! They want to have Turkish commercial houses and Turkish banks! It's too funny!"[1]

Lewis followed Irene across the prayer rugs and Byzantine paving of Saint Sophia, dragging his feet shod in immense Turkish slippers like a man on skis, and trying to keep Irene quiet. He had never seen such an exhibition of contempt in the West; it was quite different to the aversion of French and Germans, who even in their most terrible moments remained human. Five centuries of the fiercest hatred shone in Irene's eyes. She who was usually so calm could not control her fury. How could a being so closely connected with him allow herself in a single instant to be ravaged by feelings which he could not himself imagine? For the first time Lewis felt that he had bound his life to a woman of an unknown race. In the courtyard near a rococo fountain in marble and gold which ran with gleaming water, peaceable ogres wearing the new astrakhan fezes were smoking, sucking at the hookah tubes sheathed in blue velvet, amongst the circling pigeons.

After leaving Constantinople, the ship put in towards evening at Mudania, on the coast of Asia. They went on shore for a short time. Hardly had they disembarked when they came across a lorry park abandoned in an olive grove by the Greeks during their flight in the summer of 1922. Half smothered by mallows, saffron, asphodel and tobacco plants, lay the skeleton of lorries supplied by the English, their wheels in the air. Inscriptions and the number of their army corps could still be deciphered on their sides.

"A whole Greek division surrendered here," explained the guide.

"Let's go. I'm going back on board," said Irene.

Her eyes were full of tears.

When Lewis woke the next morning, the steamer was leaving the Dardanelles. It was hot. The sky had become vertical; seagulls were floating on the waves as though on treetops in a waving forest, beneath a sun unthreatened by any cloud. To the left Kum Kale protected by Turkish batteries, Troy with its lizards and the coast of Asia; to the right Sedd-el-Bahr so rich in human remains. Above the surface rose the masts and funnels of sunken British troopships; a French cruiser was just finally breaking up. Vegetation had suddenly disappeared, destroyed by the extreme heat. There was nothing to keep the sky and the earth apart. The clean line of the coast and the sea like woven metal lost themselves in the distance. It was a fitting approach to the world of heroes and of gods who make love in the hollows of the sycamores. Lewis went below and entered Irene's cabin.

"Come up quickly," he said. "Here is the Mediterranean, your mother sea."

When they reached the bridge Mytilene was already in view, scooped out in the middle like a woman lying on her side.

[1]The author does not hold himself responsible for the opinions held by his characters.

CLINGING to a rocky prominence, warm and brown as bread-crust, seamed with long scars, and without an ounce of vegetable earth, lay the only village on the island. A flight of cobbled steps led down to the little harbour adorned by a few periwinkle-coloured boats and six empty barrels. Houses made of unbaked bricks, cracked by the midday sun, a few palms, laurels and cactus white with dust, all shimmering like glaciers. Above these was the Apostolatos house, its embrasures edged with blue, entirely built of marble inside and as cool as a glass of water. Its first owners had fled in 1818 (the women with gold coins hidden in their hair) to start trading at Odessa and later at Trieste, whilst a cadet branch established itself at Bombay. The house had subsequently been restored by Irene's two old aunts, who had lived there nearly all their lives in the greatest affection; one day they left it after a bitter and relentless quarrel; one, Hera, was a Venizelist, the other, Calliope, a Constantinian. Irene had played as a child in this drawing-room furnished with Second Empire buhl; in the room in which Lewis was sleeping her mother had died.

Lewis sat on his trunk and looked about him. There was a lithograph of King Otho on the wall and a large imaginative picture, turning black, representing the massacre of Suli, where the Greek women threw their children over a precipice rather than let them fall into the hands of the Turks. He examined the furniture; a bed, a chair, a cracked ikon, a water jar and a stove full of fruit stones dipped in resin. He looked at his dusty feet and suddenly the weariness of the week's journey came over him. Paris seemed to him all dewy, fresh and far away. Once more he was being punished for his eagerness for travel. This leap into a wild, romantic, uninhabited corner of the earth overwhelmed him. This feeling of oppression sent him to sleep.

When he awoke he was rested, that is to say comforted; night was falling; Irene was near him on the terrace, before the window, her eyes fixed on the crest of a hill from which rose the mauve wall of a leper-house.

"What are you thinking about, Irene?" She started, got up and came and knelt by him.

"I was looking at this sea which never rises or falls (it was her business woman's way of saying "this tideless sea")." "I seem, like it, to be stagnating. I am so happy that I ask myself if I oughtn't to stop living. The wise thing would be to sell out now, at the top of the market."

As the evening fell the grasshoppers made a deafening noise. From the mountain came the great holy scent of goat followed by a perfume of mint so hot and so aromatic that one thought one was wearing a sprig of it against one's chest all night.

FOR six weeks Lewis lived on this islet where Irene was the only unwithered thing. In the mornings he put on a veil and went fishing, like Childe Harold,

Warming himself like any other fly.

On his return Irene would wait for him on the quay, surrounded by children with blue shaved heads, by beggars of the old school, black, shiny and wrinkled like olives. She would have been to talk to the refugees from Asia Minor; before the lazaret, outside their tents held down by stones against the Etesian winds, those prolonged winds which bring the warmth and the birds back from the South; they had been camping there for months; the women, still wearing their baggy trousers, spun flax; men, crouching by the fires, cooked mutton on wooden skewers. The meals eaten by Lewis and Irene were hardly less primitive. The fish he caught were fried in a few drops of oil. Sweet peppers. Fruit. Water. Lewis thought longingly of snipe stuffed withfoie gras, and wanted to exchange their small table for a larger one. Irene apologized, quoting a Greek proverb: "A halfpenny-worth of olives and a pennyworth of light."

Later, during the empty midday hours when the deserted street seems to waver beneath the eddies of dust where the land breeze and the sea breeze collide, Lewis took his siesta in the stillness of a kind of solar midnight. Towards five o'clock he went out on to the balcony. Just opposite lay the customs house, its miniature Parthenon front set into the ochre barracks, over which the Greek flag floated, like a sky cut into strips. Beneath the solitary eucalyptus, the proprietor of the only Ford which was for hire (Î¦OPÎ”) invited his friends to sit on the torn American cloth and to take long, motionless journeys. Donkeys came back from the fields, so laden that only their ears and their hooves emerged from the bundles of olive foliage. Above the leper-house rose a flat blue-patterned moon.

"How could the Greeks have lived on these rocky rafts? Was it for these remote and dreary fishermen, for this Southern European Ireland, that the whole of romantic Europe had shed her blood and her ink?" Lewis asked himself.

Twice a week he went down to the cafÃ© to readLe Journal d'AthÃ¨nes, edited in French. There he met officials in white linen and black-rimmed glasses who let their nails grow a yard long to show their contempt for manual labour; the lighthouse keeper who willingly lent him his telescope, out of the end of which he screwed marine panoramas, a water-melon seller, the priest with his alpaca sunshade, bearded to the eyes, his coiled hair streaming with oil, who they said had never converted anything except drachmÃ¦ into dollars. There they drank bitter coffee in little metal cups that burnt their fingers, and water so clear that the priest, giving thanks to the blue sky, made the Greek sign of the cross over it.

Alone of all Eastern nations the Greeks seem to have struck the happy mean between sluggishness and fanaticism. It is a real feat. Lewis could not accomplish it. Secretly, so that Irene should know nothing of it, seated before this sea dotted with pointed sails, Lewis was disintegrating from sheer boredom. He was succumbing to Mediterranean anÃ¦mia, had chosen sluggishness, and was letting himself drift on in a torpor akin to an agreeable demise. He really began to think that he was dead.

One morning Lewis noticed that the public square was in a ferment. Two men were standing on chairs and hurling their black fingers about. The audience was shouting and answering them with raised hands, trying to attract their attention; on inquiry Lewis found out that they were arguing about rates of insurance and that they always gambled like this at the beginning of the harvest of what are known as Corinthian raisins, which was just about to begin. He began to gamble, too. It reminded him of something.... Suddenly there before him, as in a fairy tale, stood another Greek temple also full of enigmatic gods. It was half-past twelve, and 1,500 miles away the Paris Bourse was about to open. Already the earliest quotations were being made in the street. Groups of runners, motionless as the square columns black with figures, pencil marks and caricatures, were straining at the leash. In their oak cubicles, behind green curtains, the bank representatives were taking their final orders on their private wires. Then the bell rang and pandemonium broke loose. The tide flowed in both directions up to the baskets where the orders lost their individuality, swallowed up and absorbed by cross entries, whilst in the greenish glass roof prices were already going up in columns. What a lovely toy!

Sadly Lewis longed for the West, with its sloping roofs, its rivers full of water, hard butter, the wide views of fertile country, the odourless milk, scavengers, the Bois de Boulogne full of women wearing stays, his old Martial, his spotless flat, Elsie Magnac, his other little friends, warm or cold, even Waldeck with his LavalliÃ¨re tie and his little sideways hop. (Proust once said, "He looks like an aborted partridge.") The Mediterranean appalled him with its volcanic rages, its spasmodic mountains, its barren coast inhabited by sluggish people, its plains scorched like railway embankments, its hard colours, and the monotonous flow of classic torrents beneath the boisterous sun. Oh, for a little grass! He could understand the nostalgia from which Queen Sophie of Greece must have suffered when she asked permission from King Constantine, her husband, to grow ivy on the Acropolis.

But Irene joined him, and while yet far off said anxiously:â€”

"You seem depressed; aren't you happy?"

This question was so tactless, so artless, that Lewis could only make a gesture of despair, without daring to lift his eyes.

"Profoundly happy," he answered.

"I am asking you for the truth."

"Well then ... if you love me let's go back to Paris ... just for a week. I feel I shall go mad if I don't see a cloud soon, if you can understand that."

THEY went back. It was midsummer. Paris was just like Greece: the Madeleine full of Americans, the Champs ElysÃ©es deserted, burnt up and inhabited by goats. There was a water famine. The Grand Prix had been won by a Greek.

Lewis and Irene lived an Oriental life behind closed shutters. But they were no longer on an island, and some of the warm, ribald charm of the months gone by lingered in the empty streets, and when the tourists' chars-Ã -bancs had disappeared there remained in the air something eager, dexterous and precious, which Paris will always retain, even when there are no more Frenchmen to live there.

They saw no one. Irene disliked people. She never spoke to them. "In Paris," she said, "people always seem to be expecting you to surprise them. I have nothing to give them. I only expect you, Lewis. So long as I am alone with you I am happy. I like the lower classes, children and animals: but here children always look ill, animals are ill-treated, and the work-people are nothing but greedy snobs."

They spent the mornings in bed. Lewis had kept some of his racehorses. He telephoned from his bed to Orne and Calvados to hear the latest about their shoes, their teeth and their tendons. The days passed, each one like the last. In the evening they emptied champagne bottles outside Paris in cardboard mills with old-fashioned bar parlours; they had foreign foods cooked at their table with so much brandy in the sauces that they ate in the midst of flames.

"We are spending money recklessly," said Irene, "and we are making none. We must think of that. Call me cheeseparing if you like."

"Bah!" answered Lewis. "It is bad enough not to have any money; but its far worse to stint oneself when one has."

They never went into Society. Lewis' marriage had been received with boisterous silence. He accepted the fact philosophically.

"Our union is far from being blessed; we cannot hope to please people. Both on your side and mine a certain number of people were annoyed, but the greater number were quite indifferent. Nothing is left but the natural hostility evoked by the sight of a happy couple and which we must get used to. If we ever want to see people again we have only to suffer some of those misfortunes which make it possible for our friends to breathe the same air as we do."

Idleness is the mother of all the vices, but vice is the father of all the arts. They began to go to museums. The one Irene preferred was the Naval Museum, because of the sailing ships. She had not the least artistic sense. She was quite happy living amongst ugly things. Of our art she only knew what the East knows: Ziem, Diaz, Meisonnier, Detaille. Lewis, who had looked up the Peloponnesian wars before going to Greece, wanted to explain French history to her. But he found that she knew the dates of the births and deaths of all our kings. Irene's idea of France was that rather faded, ridiculous and frail, but at the same time accurate and pathetic, picture of her that is given in Levantine schools. The only kind of food she liked was stuffed courgettes, pilaff of tomatoes with Corinthian raisins and sweet wines. Lewis revealed to her the secrets of French life, which are love and to have everything cooked in butter.

They never left one another. They lived quite remote from the hours of seven in the morning and seven in the evening, those iron blades which cut short the sweetest of assignations in the intimacy of heated rooms.

In love, Irene, like all Eastern women, was very frugal and had the simplest tastes. Lewis' large bed made her blush. She accepted his caresses with alarm and gave none back. When Lewis surprised her in her bath she put her hand to her mouth like a nymph surprised by a god.

"You can't imagine how you frightened me," she would say. And when he approached she gave him the nape of her neck.

Lewis, from habit, tried to rally her to pleasure.

"In love you must not unchain everything that sleeps in a woman," she objected. "Afterwards no one can control it. Think of the wizard's apprentice in German stories."

Like all those to whom debauchery is an old friend, Lewis felt the restraint of all this. It made Irene irresistible to him; there was so much passion in her features and even some hint of savage tendencies. And yet at every attempt he encountered nothing but prudery and a marble coldness.

Lewis exerted his experience, his subtlety and a certain low cunning. At first his results were all cut short. But he renewed his attempts. Where he had found Irene astonished now she only hesitated. He obtained more influence over her daily and he felt her yielding. At last he had to admit to himself that, perhaps to please him only, she was progressing. He did not hesitate to use her for his pleasure, without seeing that he risked spoiling her or losing her.

"What exactly is meant by going on the loose?" asked Irene.

"How shall I put it? It is throwing paper serpentines about instead of sleeping, taking drugs or one's pleasure where one finds it."

"What, exactly, do you mean by that?"

"Oh! nothing."

"I don't understand," said Irene, puzzled.

LEWIS surprised Irene before her mirror.

"I'm getting fat," she said. "You are making a Turkish woman of me."

"Why worry about it?"

"I worry about everything. I am not a sceptic like you. I have a terrible sense of my liabilities."

"Personally, I am a 'limited liability company,' and even then I am pessimist enough not to accept any."

"That's very practical of you. You are a pessimist, Lewis, without giving much thought to it, merely for the sake of convenience. One has no worries if one can persuade oneself that this world means nothing. You get annoyed because it doesn't amuse me to go to my dressmaker, because I refuse the slavery of a rope of pearls, because my attention wanders, so you say, when you talk to me about champagne vintages; it is really because I am ashamed of profiting by all these things now that I don't work. The more I reflect on it, the more convinced I am that the world is one complete harmonious whole. The confusion in which we find ourselves at present is only transient and it is wrong to add to it."

"You are a pessimistic optimist, and I am an optimistic pessimist," answered Lewis; "long ago I decided that we would get on as well as we could, I and my pleasure; I intend to live and die in its company, without bothering about other people."

"No, Lewis, it's no good being cunning. You can leave that to tradespeople."

"Things always arrange themselves."

"Yes, but not always as we want them to."

"Then why work at all?"

"But that's just it: we don't, either of us. Do you think I did what I used to do out of rapacity? I did it first of all from necessity, then for my country, and lastly because, being on the earth, I have a feeling that I belong to a human association, to an austere company formed for production and economy."

"What a pity it is that one cannot take everything you say down in writing!"

"Don't scoff. I cannot bear to take without giving, to be a luxury article like other women, expensive yesterday, a nuisance to-day."

Lewis looked at her with satirical bewilderment. He was a true Parisian, whose egoism and adaptability would survive any trial. Living forcefully and carelessly in a post-war world where everything is barter and speculation, he had never put questions of this sort to himself. He thought it sufficient, in order not to be a parasite, to pay one's taxes and to have been a soldier. He wondered at Irene. He felt she was a victim of that perfect honesty, that "demon of honesty" of which the ancients talk, which dominates the construction of all Greek buildings and enables them to endure: her life, like antiquity, was imbued with the idea of "the law" which she never lost sight of Lewis was ingenuously surprised that anyone could have simple, old-fashioned ideas without being vulgar. He imagined that elegance was the exclusive privilege of corrupt natures. A prey to similar prejudices, we have seen that he had obstinately thrown himself into a kind of Jansenism of immorality. The presence of Irene ought to have pulled him out. Unfortunately, long years of uncontrolled power, both over himself and over others, prevented him from believing or obeying, just as they prevented him from reforming; he made no changes in his mode of life. He did not attempt to make Irene respect him, well knowing that one is loved chiefly for one's faults. So it was that he went on wasting his substance. But the material perfection and the method of life which he had brought to such a high pitch before his marriage, began to fail him. Childish longings and hereditary nerves began to reassert themselves. He was leading an unhealthy life.

One evening, after dinner, Lewis yawned.

"The 'CÃ´tes de Gaillon' races are to-morrow," he said. "Are you coming?"

"Our life is perfectly absurd," was all Irene replied.

IN the weeks that followed, Irene seemed to grow much more cheerful. She went out every morning early and only came back in time for lunch. Her mail became more imposing daily. She no longer complained of feeling ill or of putting on weight. There were frequent telephone calls for her: a foreign voice would say: "Can Madame come to the tÃ©lÃ©fon?" and a long conversation would follow. Lewis, jealous of his own liberty, tried to appear to respect that of Irene; he avoided questioning her. Was it family business, or merely trifles, or love affairs? He hated to think about it. He never stopped being "worried" about it (the word takes on such a tragic meaning in the mouths of habitually indifferent people).

One morning Lewis noticed her car waiting in the Rue Cambon. He looked for the name of some masseuse or dressmaker, thinking to find Irene there; but no. A gloomy house, a sort of perpendicular steppe, with church windows round a lift shaft wrapped in a winding staircase. What could she be doing in there? And for so long, too? At half-past twelve some electricians came in from their dinner hour. Lewis examined the courtyard. The mezzanine floor seemed improper. There were pink curtains on the fifth floor. He was ashamed of spying. He who scoffed at presentiments found them everywhere.

Restless and ill at ease, he went on waiting, seated on the stairs. At one o'clock Irene came out with a large envelope under her arm. She was on her way home to lunch, five minutes late, like a man, not one of those absurd latenesses of some women. When she saw him she stopped, speechless. She got into her car (which she drove herself) but did not start it. She turned towards him and there, in the middle of the street, in that closed box, without any preamble, she explained herself:â€”

"Forgive me, Lewis ... I didn't dare tell you ... even though I couldn't bear having secrets from you. I have only been coming here for a few days ... yes, only a fortnight. Our Bank is opening a branch in Paris. Two floors of this building. The name isn't even up yet. Electric light is just being put in ... I swear to you that circumstances forced me into it. I heard recently that a Greek combine was going to issue in France a drachma loan in which we are interested. Our agent here is an idiot. One day, finding himself in difficulties, he rang me up to ask my advice. I cleared things up for him. The next day I went back to the Bank, and since then I have been there every day."

"Not every day," said Lewis. "Sometimes you don't go out. The day before yesterday, that headache ..."

"I never had a headache (if you only knew how nice it is not to have to tell you any more fibs). I brought some accounts home and I shut myself up in order to check them, without your knowledge."

Lewis said nothing for a moment, then he began to laugh:

"And I used to believe in drug cures!"

That evening, after dinner (rain outside, the first day of fires), Lewis lit his pipe:

"I have been thinking over my adventure this morning.... It is more serious than you think, Irene. The least amusing thing in this discovery by a deceived husband is that you compel me, too, to go back to work. I don't want to in the least; but I really cannot play the Oriental who lounges in a cafÃ© whilst his wife works in the fields, or, as they say in select Apache circles in the Rue d'AlÃ©sia: to let her go down tobusiness."

"It is only for a fortnight more ..."

"It is for your whole life, Irene. You will never give up working; you'd die if you did. Don't you see that you're a different woman since you have gone back to that Bank?"

Irene came and sat on the floor beside him.

"It's true. I regret it less than you think. It will be good for you to work, too.... You see you must do something useful. There cannot be two Europes, one living cleanly and well, and the other sleeping amongst lice and eating bark."

"I seem to have married a copy of the 'Civil Progress.'"

"Be generous. Don't wait until events prove to us that people must love each other. That sort of lesson costs too much."

In the dusk she scanned Lewis' energetic features which had begun to fill out and to lose their character since he had given up working.

"I have been telling myself that you, too, probably wanted to get your firm back into your own hands, but didn't like to suggest it because of me."

Lewis hastened to be insincere.

"Not at all. I was quite determined never to touch business again. Is there anything you have not lulled to sleep in me?"

"I am anxious about you. What happens nowadays to those passions, those risks, all those forceful lines that once crossed your life? Are they all sleeping, to be stirred up one day against me?"

"Don't be frightened. I soon forget."

"Do you remember? You used to call the Bourse your playground."

"I've grown a lot since then. I no longer require to play."

"Tell me the truth. Have you never done a single piece of business since our marriage?"

Lewis turned the handle of the radiator tapâ€”an act which corresponds to the old-fashioned poking of the fire.

" ... No," he answered.

Outside the wind was droning and tattling the slates on the roofs. Lewis leant over Irene.

"Well, let's see ... that is to say ... once, in Greece ... I don't think I ever told you ... I bought and sold the whole raisin crop of your island on margin."

SHORTLY afterwards the head office of the Apostolatos Bank in France was transferred from Marseilles to Paris. Irene accepted the appointment of general manager. The Greek firm was gradually giving up freighting and mercantile advances, and concentrating on big industrial undertakings and international finance. Thanks to this alteration of policy and to the amount of foreign capital they managed to attract, the shares of their affiliated companies, the "Olympic Chemical Produce Company" and the "Spartan Electricity Corporation" (for exploiting Thomson Houston systems in Peloponnesia), had doubled in value in a few months. The name of Apostolatos was, besides, "highly esteemed" in Paris, and the prize-bond drachma loan began to find its way on to the French market. There was only one shadow over all this prosperity, namely a strain in GrÃ¦co-Italian relations arising from the seizure of a Greek steamship in the Adriatic, and which was in danger of having unpleasant results.

At the Franco-African Bank the situation was quite different. Lewis found it difficult to retrieve his position there. He had left the house in great disorder. That he might run it without any control, like a proud master, he had been careful, during his years of management, never to keep anyone else informed of what was going on, to depute nothing, to classify no papers, carrying through deals without leaving any trace of them in writing, taking the files that interested him home and not bringing them back; as soon as he left, the bold undertakings which he only kept going by his enthusiasm or his daring, began to totter. People did not hesitate to discredit him. His strokes of luck became errors, his impetuosity sheer madness. When he came back the spirit of the management had changed. A whole hierarchy of unenterprising managers and timid patriarchs had got back the upper hand and took a mean outlook on things, treating them administratively without provision for the future, feebly and apathetically. Lewis wandered amongst them like a wild beast amongst a herd of cattle. He had to employ all his recovered violence to reimpose himself on them.

Work came back like a true friend: Irene put the finishing touches to his prosperity. Lewis reasserted himself and they were convinced that they would soon be as perfectly united in their work as they were in their love.

Different interests, earlier rising, hurried meals, these would all make the hours spent together more precious. Their pleasures would become escapades; their petty worries would gradually disappear. Profit taking interrupted their tender glances, urgent clearances distracted them from the ardour which united them. The striving after perfection which wrecks even the most wonderful love would be diverted into other channels. All the marvels of business existence, its dangers, the hazards of new financial ventures, the unsettled state of foreign exchanges, the pathos of liquidations and carrying over, must establish a greater sense of quiet, abundance, and permanence between them than the most intimate and temperate life ever could accomplish.

But it was not so. These two beings who had such abundant and such natural reasons for loving one another, saw their happiness fade day by day. Lewis was both the cause and the first victim of this, for he had nothing like Irene's strength of character.

It often happened that one of them opened letters meant for the other. Irene apologised on reading the first line. But Lewis could not resist reading on to the end, even after seeing that it was an Apostolatos letter.

Irene worked without any help, transacting business in her mind whilst dressing herself; Lewis could not do without a secretary, and the head of Martial reappeared against the daily background.

Like a good many business men, Lewis knew no arithmetic, and was lost like a child in the rule of three.

Irene made fun of him:

"You will finish like my uncle Priam," she said. "One evening he balanced his accounts and discovered an enormous deficit, so he blew his brains out. The next day they found he had made a mistake in his calculations. He left my aunt Clytemnestra six million francs."

The telephone bell rang. Lewis unhooked the receiver with an expressionless face, but his eyes hardened.

"It's for you, darling," he said.

He took umbrage at Irene's professional skill. He asked himself how she could be so self-sufficient. She was never late, and she received visits, drew up memoranda, answered letters and dictated reports without any apparent effort. Irene's office was always tidy, everything being cleared up at the end of each morning. Lewis' office was crammed with invoices and with memoranda vainly waiting for an answer. Irene was extremely generous in all her dealings ("Always give people plenty of rope," she said), especially when it was a question of dealing with Greeks. One felt that between Greeks there immediately arose a sort of understanding and that certain kinds of treachery were impossible. Lewis, on the other hand, had to travel alone, sword in hand, his eyes wide open, always on the alert in that atmosphere of western finance where bad faith predominates.

Irene came from a long line of goldsmith bankers who dealt in actual bullion. Lewis belonged to a generation which believes only in industrial undertakings, and has never even seen gold, and he despised deposit banks and deposits themselves which, however, he had no scruples about re-investing as he thought fit, if necessary even against the wishes of his customers. Irene followed tradition, considered thrift as being almost holy, had great respect for debentures and Government securities, and took the trouble to buy Members of Parliament and the Press; "... to be a banker," she said, "is to observe a thousand strict laws and never to act rashly."

Lewis, with feudal post-war pride, revolted from these slow methods: he was wrong. The union of politics and finance produce ugly children, but hardy ones.

"Irene," he used to say, "you represent monopolies and extortion."

"And you," she retorted, "stock jobbing and speculation."

Sometimes Lewis refused a transaction which it bored him to carry through. In this respect he was like a woman. Irene left nothing to chance; everything was grist that came to her mill. She did not forget that modern credit is the granddaughter of usury. She made use of other people's leavings. She took care not to trespass on Lewis' territory (similar enterprizes in the Mediterranean often caused their interests to overlap). But if Lewis handed her over a deal to see what she would do with it, Irene applied herself to it and favourable results soon appeared. Then Lewis regretted it. Although he proudly concealed the fact, Irene saw through him and in her frank way offered not to go on with it. But he, sulkily, would not learn his lesson; he found it difficult to forgive.

Certainly the admiration he had for Irene never abated; but sometimes he had bitter thoughts about her.

He reproached himself for them; but the images he tried to banish from his mind merely returned with greater frequency.

One morning Lewis said to Irene:

"I shan't be in to-day. I've got a business lunch on."

He was on the point of telling her all about it, and to explain to her that it was a question of examining some very attractive offers from an American combine with a view to establishing wireless communication with Asia Minor and even Persia. But, perhaps in order to intrigue Ireneâ€”believing her to be as jealous as he wasâ€”perhaps, even though she was discretion itself, in order that no word of the matter should leak out, he said nothing.

That evening, seized with remorse, he took up the tale where he had left it in the morning.

"I hadn't time to explain. I invited two American bankers to luncheon. They have just come from London ..."

"Isn't it about the wireless in Asia Minor?" interrupted Irene. "Be very careful; your people have not, as they pretend, got the Marconi Company behind them. They came to me with it a week ago and I made some inquiries. It is not a serious proposition."

In less time than one could imagine the intercourse between them began to lose sincerity. On Irene's side it was because she felt that her husband was drifting away from her. On Lewis' side it was because at every turn he found her to be his master. He had the impression of continuing a struggle against an intimate and skilful adversary who had made him bite the dust at their first encounter. That enterprise of the San Lucido mines which had brought them together by separating them, and of which a few months earlier Lewis could not think without emotion because it had been the origin of his happiness, now humiliated him as it prospered more and more: he found himself loathing it when he read that it was entering on its second financial year, that the profits had been most satisfactory and that there was quite a possibility of a dividend being declared.

He remembered on that occasion that it was the anniversary of their meeting in Sicily. He promised himself that he would take Irene some of the pungent and intoxicating jasmin of that first evening.

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