et a job, rent a house? I can't. He knows well enough
I'm stuck here unless I go to the _Omphale_ or the _Ottoman House_, or
one of those horrible places. And then,' she added, 'it wouldn't be long
before I'd be sitting in the _Odeon_ half the night and wishing I was
dead.'

"'You know,' I said, severely, 'that if you had the slightest intention
of doing anything of the sort you wouldn't breathe a word of it to me of
all people.'

"For a moment she held out, smirking a little.

"'You fancy yourself,' she said, quoting a by-gone London phrase.

"'To that extent,' I insisted. 'What do you suppose I came up here for?
Why did I wander all over Saloniki last night trying to find you? To
hear you say things like that? What do you suppose I am made of?
Listen!'

"I don't suppose men often tell a woman the things I told her then, but
it was imperative that I should clear away the difficulties between us.
I had to convince her that I was not to be humbugged by her fatal
inherited proclivity for a grandiose emotional role, a proclivity for
playing up to some mysterious imaginary being which she labelled herself
and strove to erect in the mind of her protagonist. It wouldn't do.
There was something numbing in the spectacle of her attempt to present
herself as already a painted shadow in the purlieus of a Levantine city.
In the long blue dressing gown, against a lemon-tinted stone wall, the
morning sun irradiating the exquisite, exotic face, she had an adult
air, so to speak, an air of lovely maturity and grave virtue. I would
say she looked much more like a saint than a sinner, if I could reach
any satisfactory conclusions as to the nature of a saint. I talked, as
they say, straight, and the culmination of my invective was a blunt
statement about her intelligence.

"'You aren't clever enough to be as bad as you try to make out,' I said,
and she looked down at her hands.

"'All the same,' she remarked almost to herself, 'you are taking an
awful risk in talking to me like this. How do you know I shouldn't
go--go to pot altogether, later on? I'm thinking of you, you know,' she
added.

"'There you go again!' I exclaimed. She put up her hand as a token of
surrender, and there came into her voice that unforgettably alluring
timbre which, as I told you before, evoked mysterious memories and
invested her with an extraordinary quality which one might almost
describe as spiritual iridescence, a glamour of sybillant charm and
deli