he folk who "went out" to the East and into Africa as traders
and factors, and who carried Haverstock Hill with them up the Nile and
the Hoang Ho. Unimaginative and devoid of conscious art, they furnished,
without knowing or caring much about the matter, the raw material of
romance. They did outrageously romantic things under the pretence of
providing for their families or getting orders for their firm. And it
was this generic inherited character, working to the surface during the
reaction from his recent exertions and emotional stress, that meant more
to Mr. Spokesly than either the war or the London School of Mnemonics.
The basis of romantic adventure is character, and a man's real character
is sometimes overlaid with curious artificial ornaments. Mr. Spokesly
had been very much in error both as to his own character and his
destiny. He had no more need of memory training than Mr. Dainopoulos. In
the future his care would be to forget rather than remember. His recent
experiences had taught him much. What was to come would teach him still
more.

He found Mr. Dainopoulos in his extremely diminutive office in a
cross-street near the Post Office. Mr. Dainopoulos was ostensibly a
money-changer. In front of his premises was a glass case with an
assortment of currency. A few sovereigns in a saucer caught the eye, and
might have inspired the casual passenger with polite wonder how they had
found their way there when honest men in England had forgotten how they
looked. And at the back of his premises Mr. Dainopoulos had a safe
nearly as large as the office. Between these two emblems of financial
affairs were a table and two chairs. On the walls were musty insurance
calendars and obsolete steamship sailing lists, for Mr. Dainopoulos had
done a brisk agency in the past with emigrants, stimulating the cupidity
of Balkan peasants with lively handbills describing the streets of New
York and Chicago as being paved with gold. At the present moment, when
Mr. Spokesly came in, the other chair was occupied by a long thin person
folded loosely together and smoking a cigarette in a holder nearly a
foot long. He had one of those physiognomies that baffle analysis by the
simple expedient of never under any circumstances meeting one's eye. The
pinched cranium, the cold, pale blue eyes, the hooked nose coming down
over a toothless mouth to meet an up-turning pointed chin, might lead
one to think him old, yet he was no more than forty-five in fa