in Noureddin Moustapha Pasha. The Egyptian’s smile vanished almost before the door was closed behind him—the moment, in fact, that he saw me. He had evidently expected a tete-a-tete.
Neither clothes nor nationality appear to me to matter much, and I’m not quite such a born fool as to expect a foreigner’s ideas of right and wrong to agree with mine exactly. You can always make allowance for another fellow’s standards, provided he has them and believes in them, just as, for instance, a man who makes cloth by the yard can sell it by the metre if he must. But there are men of all creeds and colours, who can mouth morality like machines printing paper money, but who you know at the first glance have only one rule, and that an automatic, self-adjusting, expanding and collapsing one, that adapts itself to every circumstance and always in the user’s favour. This man was clearly one of those.
A handsome man, not very dark-skinned, but looking more like a dark man who had bleached indoors than a pale man who had bronzed a little in the open. He was immaculately dressed in one of those grey tweed suits that they get such an awful price for from the men who want to look like wealthy sports. He had a little black moustache, the thin neck of the city-born Egyptian, a rather prominent nose that carne within an ace of being shapely, and bright, dark eyes.
The worst of him to look at was his feet and fingernails; the first were much too small for his height, and encased in shoes that might not have disgraced a woman, and his fingernails were polished until they shone with a feminine pinkiness.
Another way he had of being objectionable was to assume that he understood you perfectly, and that you and he were on a basis of good fellowship merely because he was willing that such should be the case.
“Ah-ha! Miss Leich,” he began. “I thought you would come round to my viewpoint; but you needn’t have come all this way to see me, really. However—”
“What is your viewpoint?” she asked him blandly.
“That you should sell me that Egyptian property. You have no earthly right to it, you know. Egypt for the Egyptians—that is our motto nowadays.”
“And America for any person who cares to come over here and help himself, I suppose?” she retorted.
“You don’t suppose I came to this country for nothing, do you?” he asked. The tart note came into his voice as suddenly as if someone had kicked him.
“Nobody ever does,” she answered. “If you had come to pay the war debts you’d be a novelty.”
She was enjoying the interview, and as that fact gradually dawned on him all the man’s acrid jealousy, that is the underlying secret of Egyptian character, began coming to the surface. He threw diplomacy to the winds, and from that moment bore in mind only one circumstance, as his restless eye betrayed-namely, that I was capable of taking him with one hand and dropping him down the elevator shaft. He and I had exchanged no words, but had no misunderstandings.
“I will make my wants known,” he said, “and it makes no difference who hears. The fact is my friend Mrs. Aintree employs the same firm of attorneys—”
“Zezwinski and Zoom?”
“Yes. We have compared notes. We were drawing up articles of incorporation of a small company, to be financed partly in the United States, for the exploitation of that real. Estate of which you happen to possess the title.”
“Forehanded, weren’t you?” remarked Joan Angela.
“Remarkably so. It transpired that legal rights could be purchased which would give the purchaser a claim to that section of your ranch, Miss Leich, on which the most profitable oil-wells have been drilled—‘brought in’ I believe is the expression. I purchased those rights for cash through Zezwinski and Zoom, who represent the estate of the man who originally owned the rights—an estate now in litigation. My purchase was agreed to by the various litigants, and will be confirmed by the courts of California, I don’t doubt. So, you see, I am no longer in the position of one who invites you to sell your Egyptian land to me. I now come to you and say: Unless you hand me the title to those thousand acres in the Fayoum, I will enforce my claim against your California property! You are no longer in a position to please yourself, Miss Leich!”
“Do you think it was sportsmanlike to go behind my back and buy up those rights?” she asked, trying to look serious.
“It was legal,” he retorted.
“Do you realize what those rights would be worth, if anything?” she asked him. “D’you mean to tell me you’ll trade a million dollars’ worth of rights in California against a thousand acres in the Fayoum? Either you know the rights you have bought behind my back are worthless and you’re merely trying to blackmail me, or—and I suppose it’s possible—you set a higher value on those one thousand Fayoum acres than you do on all my oil! There’s nothing doing, Moustapha Pasha! If you think there’s any value to those California rights you’ve bought, instruct your lawyers and bring suit. I’ll fight.”
He rose from his chair about as lividly angry as a rattler at a picnic.
“I am not a man accustomed to letting my plans be upset by a—”
“By a woman?”
“I shall proceed to enforce my rights.”
“Be a man!” she said, nodding.
He was about to make some acrid answer to that when the telephone rang to announce the arrival of a bevy of Joan Angela’s women friends, who had only just heard of her appearance on the scene. She invited them all up to the room, so the Egyptian and I had to make ourselves scarce.
“We will meet again,” he said stiffly, bowing himself out.
We were only one flight up, but he refused to walk downstairs. He would have considered it infra dig. However, you don’t have to agree with a man on all points before holding him awhile in conversation, so I sat down beside him on one of the row of rockers that faced the front window in the lobby.
“Do you know that young woman well?” he asked me.
“I saw a good deal of her several years ago,” I answered guardedly.
“Oh. So you are not her friend?”
“You’d have to ask her that.”
“Her lover, perhaps?”
“We’re all in love with her. It’s a sort of religion, or perhaps a cult, in this part of the world.”
“What are you? How do you stand toward her?” he asked, eyeing me sharply sideways.
“I’m an acquaintance.”
I would have kicked the brute for his insolence, if Joan Angela hadn’t notified me that she wished to ditch him herself. One doesn’t lightly deprive her of her privileges.
“Do you know her well enough to tell her the plain truth?” he asked.
“I know her a lot too well to lie to her,” I answered.
“Tell her this, then, for her own good. In my country I have power as well as wealth; the terms are synonymous in Egypt.”
“You need brains over here, if you hope to keep the one or get the other,” I answered.
“And it is brains that she will find in opposition to her! I am no fool!” he said, suddenly sitting sharply upright and facing me. “You tell her that! She has to deal with a man who is not accustomed to being refused by women! I tell you, I get my way! I know ropes! When I engage lawyers, they are smart ones, and I make them earn their fees! Do you know Egypt? You have heard of me? Then tell that young woman what you have heard of me! Tell her what happened when an American firm brought suit against me! Perhaps you heard of that too? I could have acquired her Fayoum property without troubling to cross what you call your herring-pond. It is only a question of paying lawyers.”
It occurred to me to let him ram his conceited head into trouble in his own way, and then, like the devil in Mr.