to try it--but I suppose there is a snap and a tang about a life that
costs five pounds a day, which is irresistible to some souls. Or is it
that the _cost_ of things never enters into these untrammelled people's
heads at all? I wonder.

"But for all my personal interest in that Italian article and the black
ending in Bow Street and a sentence of three years, I appreciated the
author's treatment of his subject. He made a short story of it in the
manner of Flaubert, minute, vivid and grim. He showed the weekly dances
wearing thin at the end of the season, the daughters of the Levantine
ship-chandlers, and Greek tobacco merchants, and Maltese petty
officials, looking rather bleak at the prospect of another barren summer
in Alexandria, when a new planet suddenly swims into their ken, young,
rich, handsome, fascinating. They wake up again and the fight begins.
You can see the Italian journalist, small, dark, with a pointed beard,
pointed shoes, and sharp points of light in his dark eyes, hovering on
the edge of the dance or perhaps taking a turn with the Levantine lady,
observant and urbane. Things go on like this for a week or so when, the
P. and O. boat from Brindisi having arrived at Port Said the day before,
two English strangers arrive at the hotel. There is a dance that
evening. I don't suppose this was strictly true, but I can understand
the artistic pleasure it would give the Italian journalist to make
little changes like that in his story. You remember Sir Walter Scott's
confessed passion for giving a story 'a new hat and stick.' Well, there
was a dance that evening, let us say, and the ladies, tired of the
eternal English officer who never intends to let matters come to a head;
tired of the French Canal clerk with his little friend in Alexandria;
tired, perhaps, even of the witty and urbane Italian journalist, who I
imagine loved his _Genova la Superba_, his Chianti and the keen air and
heavenly blue of his Ligurian Apennines far more than he did that flat
Delta full of all the half-breeds of the world--the ladies waited
expectantly for the return of their new inspiration from Heliopolis,
where he was gone with a party in his hundred-horse-power car. They wait
in vain. Later the party return, somewhat puzzled themselves, explaining
that two gentlemen had come out and interrupted the affair by drawing
Mr. Carville aside and conversing with him inaudibly. And Mr. Carville
makes his excuses. He apologizes to the Beyro