He saw the war-weary battalions returning to
their toil, slaving to pay off the cost of their adventure. This was the
way of the world as he knew it. It was no use blaming him: he merely
took advantage of human need and folly, as we all do. He had been
through wars before and knew the inevitable reactions, and the almost
incredible cheapness of money that followed. He was by instinct one of
those who, like camp-followers on a grand scale, prosper amid the
animosities of simpler folk; persons who found fortunes upon great wars,
as did the Jews in London after 1815 and the bourgeois bankers of Paris
after the Revolution. And it surprised him how little his wife knew, how
little she questioned the world in which she lived. Of course it was
charming, and he was fascinated just because she had that amazing racial
blindness to facts and lived in a fanciful world of her own. The English
were all like that, it seemed to him.

He put his arms about her.

"In my mind I see it. You wait. Everything you can think of, all very
fine."

"Here in Saloniki?"

"No!"

"In England?"

Mr. Dainopoulos laughed a little and shook his head. He was quite sure
England wouldn't be any place for him after this war. In his own private
opinion, there wouldn't be any England within ten years from now, which
shows how logical and wide-awake Latins can make errors of judgment. In
any case, there were too many Jews there.

"Because I don't want to go to America," she remarked, still rumpling
his hair.

"America! What makes you think of America? You must be losing your mind,
Alice." He almost shivered. He was just as well able to make money in
America as anywhere else, but what use would it be to him in such a
place? It is extremely difficult for the Anglo-Saxon to realize it, but
men like Mr. Dainopoulos find occidental institutions a spiritual
desolation. He recalled the time when he boarded in Newark, New Jersey,
and worked in a felt-hat factory. The house was of wood without even a
floor of stone, and he could not sleep because of the vermin. And the
food! He experienced afresh the nausea of those meals among the roomers,
the bulging haunches of the negroid waitress colliding with his
shoulders as she worked round and served the rows and rows of oval
dishes dripping with soggy, impossible provender. And the roomers:
English, German, and American, with their horrible whiskey and their
ever-lasting gibberish of "wop" and "dago," their hints a