ned a
glimmer of what Nietzsche must have meant when he spoke of the
transvaluation of all values. I was startled by the sudden realization
of how tenaciously I had been holding to my belief in that man's
essential unworthiness. You regard a man for years as despicable and
rotten, judging him as though you were God, and then you meet a woman
who worships the very ground he treads on, or a child to whom he is a
fanatically fond parent. Of course, the enthusiasm of Monsieur Nikitos
for his patron was discounted for by my low estimate of Nikitos
himself. Possibly, I mused in a startled way, as we entered the dark
ante-room of Captain Macedoine's abode, M. Nikitos was regarded by a
septuagenarian mother as an angel of light. The possibility remains in
suspense, for of that gentleman's antecedents I don't recall any
particulars. I saw him again, as you shall hear, but he failed to
prepossess me in his favour. He departed from my view, a perplexing and
polysyllabic problem, claiming for himself a useless and preposterous
purity. But perhaps it was not so useless from his point of view.
Perhaps he owed his brief political omnipotence, when the whole country
flamed into battle, murder, and sudden death, to his peculiar mania for
a spectacular chastity. They say men fear such freaks, and deem them
endowed with sinister supernatural powers. Possibly. There are strange
things embedded in that fierce lava-flow of the Balkan volcanoes,
congealed agonies and solidified monstrosities of soul.

"At first I could see nothing save that the chamber was large and lofty.
Even at the moment it struck me--a sort of last attempt at superiority,
you know--that it would be just like Captain Macedoine to live in a
large and lofty chamber without much light. And then, as I saw him,
propped up among cushions on an immense bed, with a table close at hand
on which reposed writing materials, books, a photograph, and a small
shaded lamp, I wondered why the characteristics which in him had created
such animosity should take the form of an alluring hypnotism in his
daughter. Such thoughts make one uneasy and anxious for one's position
as a super in the play. For that was the upshot of it, that I was
shakily anxious to see her again, to see Captain Macedoine because he
was her father, to drift, I knew not where. I was a pretty spectacle to
myself, I can assure you!

"His illness had emaciated him, and the crimson bedspread, together with
the long, droop