Baroudi was as totally devoid of ordinary scruples as the average well-bred Englishman is full of them. He had, no doubt, a code of his own to guide his conduct towards his co-religionists, but this code seemed wholly inoperative when he was brought into relation with those of another race and faith.

And Mrs. Armine was a woman, and therefore, in his eyes, on a lower plane than himself.

Among the attractions which he possessed for Mrs. Armine, certainly not the least was his lack of respect for women as women. It is usually accepted as true of all women that, however low one of them has fallen, she preserves for ever within her a secret longing to be respected by man. Whether Mrs. Armine shared this secret longing or not, one thing is certain: her husband had respect for her, and she wore his respect like a chain; Baroudi had not respect for her, and she wore his lack of respect like a flower.

When she had visited the Loulia, reading, as women often do, the character of a man in the things by which he has deliberately surrounded himself, Mrs. Armine had grasped at once certain realities of him which, in his intercourse with her, he was at no pains to conceal. Mingled with his penetration, his easy subtlety, his hard lack of scruple, his boldness that was smooth, and polished, and cool as bronze, there went a naïve crudity, a simplicity like that of a school-boy, an uncivilized ingenuousness which was startling, and yet attractive, in its unexpectedness. The man who had bought the cuckoo-clocks and the cheap vases, who had set the gilded ball dancing upon the water of the faskeeyeh, who had broken the dim harmony of the colours in his resting-place by the introduction of that orange hue which seemed to reflect certain fierce lights within his nature, walked hand-in-hand with the shrewd money-maker, the determined pleasure-seeker, the sensual dreamer, the acute diplomatist. The combination was piquant, though not very unusual in the countries of the sun. It appealed to Mrs. Armine's wayward love of novelty, it made her feel that despite her wide experience of life in relation to men there still remained terra incognita on which she might set her feet. And though she did not care particularly for children, and had never longed to have a child of her own, she knew she would love occasionally to play with the child enclosed in this man, to pet it, to laugh at it, to feel superior to it, to feel tender over it, as the hardest woman can feel tender over that which wakes in her woman's dual capacity for passion and for motherliness. She both feared Baroudi and smiled, almost laughed, at him; she both wondered at and saw through him. At one moment he was transparent as glass to her view, at another he confronted her like rock surrounded by the blackness of an impenetrable night. And he never cared whether she was looking through the glass or whether she was staring, baffled, at the rock.