izon. There was nothing
illogical in this. Being an adventuress is not so very different from
being an adventurer. One goes into it because one has the temperament
and the desire for adventure. And Evanthia was by heredity an
adventuress. Her father belonged to that little-known and completely
misunderstood fraternity--the _comitadji_ of the Balkans. It is not yet
comprehended by the western nations that to a large section of these
southeastern people civilization is a disagreeable inconvenience. They
regard the dwellers in towns with contempt, descending upon them in
sudden raids when the snows melt, and returning to their mountain
fortresses laden with booty and sometimes with hostages. They maintain
within political frontiers empires of their own, defying laws and
defeating with ease the police-bands who are sent to apprehend them.
They have no virtues save courage and occasionally fidelity and no
ideals save the acquisition of spoil. They invariably draw to themselves
the high-spirited youths of the towns; and the girls, offered the choice
of drudging poverty or the protection of a farmer of taxes, are
sometimes discovered to have gone away during the excitement of a
midnight foray. So had Evanthia's mother, a lazy, lion-hearted baggage
of Petritch whose parents had breathed more easily when they were free
at last from her incessant demands and gusts of rage. But the man who
had carried her off into the mountains was nearing the end of his
predatory career, and very soon (for he had no enemies, having killed
them all) he was able to purchase a franchise from the Government and
turn tax-farmer himself. He was so successful that he became a rich man,
and the family, fighting every inch of the way, took a villa in Pera. It
was there Evanthia was educated in the manner peculiar to that part of
the world. When she was eighteen she could make fine lace, cook, fight,
and speak six languages without being able to write or read any at all.
The villa in which they lived was for ever in an uproar, for all three
gave battle on the smallest pretext. They lived precisely as the beasts
in the jungle live--diversifying their periods of torpor with bursts of
frantic vituperation and syncopating enjoyment. Neither European nor
Asiatic, they maintained an uneasy balance on the shores of the
Bosphorus between the two, until Evanthia's mother, a vigorous, handsome
brunette trembling with half-understood longings and frustrated
ambitions