eaming patent leather slippers and then the other, and
drew up his feet under him on the broad leather seat, and drank more
coffee, and lit a big cigarette; after which he sat almost motionless
for at least half an hour, looking most of the time at a statue which
occupied the principal place in the middle of the room. Now and then he
half closed his eyes, and then opened them again suddenly, with an
evident sense of pleasure. He had the air of a man completely satisfied
with his surroundings, his sensations and his thoughts. There was
something almost Buddha-like in his attitude, in his perfect calm, in
the expression of his quiet almond eyes; even the European clothes he
wore did not greatly hinder the illusion. Just then he did not look at
all the sort of person to do anything sudden or violent, to pitch order
to the dogs and tear the law to pieces, to kill anything that stood in
his way as coolly as he would kill a mosquito, or to lay violent hands
on what he wanted if he was hindered from taking it peacefully. Neither
does a wild-cat look very dangerous when it is dozing.

On the rare occasions when he allowed any one but his servants to enter
that room, he said that the statue was a copy, which he had caused to
be very carefully made after an original found in Lesbos and secretly
carried off by a high Turkish official, who kept it in his house and
never spoke of it. This accounted for its being quite unknown to the
artistic world. He called attention to the fact that it was really a
facsimile, rather than a copy, and he seemed pleased at the perfect
reproduction of the injured points, which were few, and of the stains,
which were faint and not unpleasing. But he never showed it to an
artist or an expert critic.

'A mere copy,' he would say, with a shrug of his shoulders. 'Nothing
that would interest any one who really knows about such things.'

A very perfect copy, a very marvellous copy, surely; one that might
stand in the Vatican, with the Torso, or in the Louvre, beside the
Venus of Milo, or in the British Museum, opposite the Pericles, or in
Olympia itself, facing the Hermes, the greatest of all, and yet never
be taken for anything but the work of a supreme master's own hands. But
Constantine Logotheti shrugged his shoulders and said it was a mere
copy, nothing but a clever facsimile, carved and chipped and stained by
a couple of Italian marble-cutters, whose business it was to
manufacture antiquities for the