Page:Frank Owen - The Actress.djvu/71

Rh tusks,' he said, 'extends about three and a half feet out of the head and probably two feet in. They average, I should judge, about seventy pounds each, and they're prime ivory worth about nine ruppes per pound. Pretty good for a morning's work,' he concluded. This statement put an idea in my mind, and one year later I opened a station in Italian Somaliland, where I traded with the natives for ivory which they brought from the interior. Sometimes I gave them cottons, often old rifles and petty knickknacks which I imported cheaply from England. In three years I had amassed a fortune and sold out to a Europeon concern for a tidy sum. My negotiations with East Africa ended, I returned to Persia. I settled in Teheran, for it is the largest city, and I wanted to enjoy life and luxury.

"In every man's life," he continued thoughtfully, "at some time there comes a woman whom he thinks is his ideal, the pivot about which his life revolves. I was no exception; there was such a woman in my life. She was an Italian. Her name was Catherine Lucio. She was very beautiful, and as I looked upon her, I thought more beautiful than the best I had ever met, and I wondered that my life had not seemed empty before, without her, for she seemed to fill it so entirely. But her beauty was physical, not mental; it was rather of the face and body than the soul. She was one of those women incapable of love for love's sake; not a lover of men but of wealth and riches. From a man's first entrance into the world till the day of his death, he keeps moulding in his own mind the