"Do you remember? You used to call the Bourse your playground."
"I've grown a lot since then. I no longer require to play."
"Tell me the truth. Have you never done a single piece of business since our marriage?"
Lewis turned the handle of the radiator tap—an act which corresponds to the old-fashioned poking of the fire.
" ... No," he answered.
Outside the wind was droning and tattling the slates on the roofs. Lewis leant over Irene.
"Well, let's see ... that is to say ... once, in Greece ... I don't think I ever told you ... I bought and sold the whole raisin crop of your island on margin."
[VIII]
SHORTLY afterwards the head office of the Apostolatos Bank in France was transferred from Marseilles to Paris. Irene accepted the appointment of general manager. The Greek firm was gradually giving up freighting and mercantile advances, and concentrating on big industrial undertakings and international finance. Thanks to this alteration of policy and to the amount of foreign capital they managed to attract, the shares of their affiliated companies, the "Olympic Chemical Produce Company" and the "Spartan Electricity Corporation" (for exploiting Thomson Houston systems in Peloponnesia), had doubled in value in a few months. The name of Apostolatos was, besides, "highly esteemed" in Paris, and the prize-bond drachma loan began to find its way on to the French market. There was only one shadow over all this prosperity, namely a strain in Græco-Italian relations arising from the seizure of a Greek steamship in the Adriatic, and which was in danger of having unpleasant results.
At the Franco-African Bank the situation was quite different. Lewis found it difficult to retrieve his position there. He had left the house in great disorder. That he might run it without any control, like a proud master, he had been careful, during his years of management, never to keep anyone else informed of what was going on, to depute nothing, to classify no papers, carrying through deals without leaving any trace of them in writing, taking the files that interested him home and not bringing them back; as soon as he left, the bold undertakings which he only kept going by his enthusiasm or his daring, began to totter. People did not hesitate to discredit him. His strokes of luck became errors, his impetuosity sheer madness. When he came back the spirit of the management had changed. A whole hierarchy of unenterprising managers and timid patriarchs had got back the upper hand and took a mean outlook on things, treating them administratively without provision for the future, feebly and apathetically. Lewis wandered amongst them like a wild beast amongst a herd of cattle. He had to employ all his recovered violence to reimpose himself on them.