"I am interested in excavations."
"Oh! And are you allowed to make them yourself?"
"Not always."
I glanced at him quickly, wondering if he meant that answer more for me than for the girl. But his face told nothing.
"Would you be able to, if you were rich enough?"
"It is possible." "Well, I'd be willing to give you a big salary for showing us about Cairo, and perhaps going up the Nile."
"You do not know who I am, Mademoiselle. Ask your friend Lord Ernest Borrow. Perhaps he may remember something about my circumstances now he has recalled my face."
I was honestly not sure whether this were further deviltry, or an appeal for help. In any case, I thought it time for the scene to end. "I told you," I said to Monny in English, "that he was a man of importance, not at all the sort of person you could expect to engage for a guide. You must see now that he's a gentleman. And a—a—an Egyptian gentleman is just the same as any other."
"Surely not quite!" she answered in the same language, and I realized my foolish mistake in using it, as if I meant her to understand that Antoun Effendi knew it too little to catch our secrets.
"An Egyptian man can't have the same feelings as a European? Why, for hundreds and hundreds of years they've been an enslaved race, like our black people at home. We'd never think of calling even the fairest quadroon man a gentleman, though he might be wonderfully good looking and nice mannered."