"Well," said Mr. Spokesly, "he's his own master, and he can please himself about that. To tell the truth, though, if there's anything in—what you were speaking of, I'd just as soon he wasn't in it. You see what I mean?" Mr. Dainopoulos nodded and drew at his narghileh. "He's a friend of mine, and very good friend, too, but we got to draw a line somewhere." Again Mr. Dainopoulos nodded as he leaned across the table.
"And another thing!" he remarked in his muffled tones, and he held the mouthpiece of the narghileh just in front of his lips as though it were a speaking tube and he was engaged in conversation with someone at the other end. He even cast his eyes down, and seemed to abandon Mr. Spokesly entirely. "And another thing. Mr. Bates, he very fond—you know—very fond of the mademoiselles. That's all right. If you like them, very good. But Mr. Bates, he comes all the time to me. Want me—you understand? Now, I do no business in that line, none at all. I don't like it. Plenty men tell you, 'Oh, yes, you come with me.' You understand? But me, I got my family to think about. Now you understand?"
"It is not respectable," added Mr. Dainopoulos in a deep tone, and relapsed into silence and the narghileh.
Mr. Spokesly did not reply. Even when they had left the café and were being driven along the quai in the direction of the White Tower, on their left the dazzle and noise of cafés-chantant and cinemas, on their right the intense darkness of the Gulf, he did no more than acquiesce in what Mr. Dainopoulos was saying. For to tell the truth, Mr. Spokesly was making certain readjustments within himself. Neither Mr. Bates nor Mr. Dainopoulos was of vital importance to the growth of his soul, yet they come in here. They were backgrounds on which were silhouetted combinations novel to him. He had to find room in his mind for the conception of a shady person who cultivated the domestic virtues. Mr. Spokesly might be a man of inferior calibre, easily swayed by the prospect of easy money, but his mind swung naturally to the equilibriums of respectability. "All that," as he called it, "was a thing o' the past." He was tired of the shabby and meretricious byways he had frequented, in moderation, for so long. With more knowledge of introspection he would have known this as one of the signs of coming change. Coming events are very often a glorified reincarnation of dead desires. Dreams come true. Fortunate men recognize them in time.
"Your family?" said Mr. Spokesly, and the man beside him turned towards him and said:
"When I say 'family' I mean 'my wife.'"
Mr. Spokesly had no definite image in his mind of the domestic arrangements of a man like Mr. Dainopoulos. The scarlet tarboosh on that gentleman's head leaned the Englishman's fancy to a harem. In any case, the Island Race imagine that every Levantine who wears a fez is a Turk, that every Turk is a polygamist, and finally that polygamy implies a score or two of wives locked up in cupboards. But the tone in which Mr. Dainopoulos uttered the word "wife" precluded anything of this sort. It was a tone which Mr. Spokesly immediately comprehended. It was the tone in which Englishmen refer to their most valued possession and their embodied ideals. There is no mistaking it. There is nothing like it in the world. It is a tone implying an authorized and expurgated edition of the speaker's emotional odyssey.
"And so," he went on, "you can see how I don't want to get mixed up in any of these here places." And he opened his hand towards the subdued glare of the cafés and dance halls. Mr. Spokesly saw. He saw also, in imagination, Archy Bates sitting, hand to moustache, amid the chalk-faced hetairai of Saloniki, second-rate harpies who had had their day on the Parisian trottoirs, and who had been shipped by a benevolent government to assuage the ennui of the Armée d'Orient. He saw them from time to time with his physical eyes, too, as they came to the doors of their refuges and, setting off to visit confederates, flung a glance of shrewd appraisal towards the passing vehicle.
"Yes," he muttered. "I see, Mr.—Mr.——"
"Dainopoulos," said that gentleman.