'Julie will see you,' giggled the Danish Excellency.
'And what if she does?' he retorted.
'You have no respect, no veneration,' she chided him.
'For maman Lafarge? la bonne bourgeoise!' he exclaimed, but not very loudly.
'Alexander!' she said, but her tone said, 'I adore you.'
'One must be something,' the young Christopoulos had once told himself; 'I will be insolent and contemptuous; I will impose myself upon Herakleion; my surroundings shall accept me with admiration and without protest.'
He consequently went to Oxford, affected to speak Greek with difficulty, interlarded his English with American slang, instituted a polo club, and drove an American trotter. He was entirely successful. Unlike many a greater man, he had achieved his ambition. He knew, moreover, that Madame Lafarge would give him her daughter for the asking.
'Shall I make Julie sing?' he said suddenly to the Danish Excellency, searching among the moving groups for the victim of this classic joke of Herakleion.
'Alexander, you are too cruel,' she murmured.
He was flattered; he felt himself an irresistible autocrat and breaker of hearts. He tolerated the Danish Excellency, as he had often said in the club, because she had no other thought than of him. She, on the other hand, boasted in her fat, good-humoured way to her intimates,—