, you unnerstand! Better give it away."

"I'll give it to Miss Solaris."

Mr. Dainopoulos eyed Mr. Spokesly over his shoulder as he sat with his
elbows on the table holding up his glass. Mr. Spokesly put the ring in
his pocket.

"She'll take it, all right," said his friend at length, and drank.

"What makes you so sure?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

Mr. Dainopoulos was not prepared to answer that question in English. He
found that English, as he knew it, was an extraordinarily wooden and
cumbersome vehicle in which to convey those lightning flashes and glares
and sparkles of thought in which most Latin intelligences communicate
with each other. You could say very little in English, Mr. Dainopoulos
thought. He could have got off some extremely good things about Evanthia
Solaris in the original Greek, but Mr. Spokesly would not have
understood him. If he were to take a long chance, however, by saying
that the vulture up in the sky sees the dead mouse in the ravine, he was
not at all sure of the result.

"Aw," he said in apology for his difficulty, "the ladies, they like the
pretty rings."

"I can see you don't like her," said Mr. Spokesly, smiling a little.

"My friend," said Mr. Dainopoulos, and he turned his black, bloodshot
eyes, with their baggy pouches of skin forming purplish crescents below
them, on his companion. "My friend, I'm married. Women, I got no use for
them, you unnerstand? You no unnerstand. By and by, you know what I
mean. My wife, all the time she sick, all the time. She like Miss
Solaris. All right. For my wife anything in the world. But me, I got my
business. By and by, ah!"

"What about by and by?" asked Mr. Spokesly, curious in spite of himself.
He began to think Mr. Dainopoulos was a rather interesting human being,
a remarkable concession from an Englishman.

Mr. Dainopoulos did not reply immediately. He had a vision splendid in
his mind, but it was hazy and vague in details. His somewhat oriental
conception of happiness was tempered by an austere idealism inspired by
his wife. He could never have achieved his ambition, let us say, in
Haverstock Hill, London N., or Newark, N. J. He demanded a background of
natural features as a setting for his grandiose plans for the future. No
westerner could understand his dreams, for example, of a black
automobile with solid silver fittings and upholstery of orange corded
silk, in which his wife could take the air along a magnificent corniche
road flanked b