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 last averted his eyes and Mrs. Maurier glanced briefly toward the companionway. She was firm.

“Poor Talliaferro,” the Semitic man said. Fairchild led the way along the passage, pausing at his door while his gang trod his heels. “Did you see his face? She’ll keep him under her thumb from now on.”

“I don’t feel sorry for him,” Fairchild said. “I think he kind of likes it: he’s always a little uncomfortable with men, you know. Being among a bunch of women seems to restore his confidence in himself, gives him a sense of superiority which his contacts with men seem to have pretty well hammered out of him. I guess the world does seem a kind of crude place to a man that spends eight hours a day surrounded by lace trimmed crêpe de chine,” he added, fumbling at the door. “Besides, he can’t come to me for advice about how to seduce somebody. He’s a fairly intelligent man, more sensitive than most, and yet he too labors under the illusion that art is just a valid camouflage for rutting.” He opened the door at last and they entered and sat variously while he knelt and dragged from beneath the bunk a heavy suitcase.

“She’s quite wealthy, isn’t she?” Major Ayers asked from the bunk. The Semitic man, as was his way, had already preempted the single chair. Gordon leaned his back against the wall, tall and shabby and arrogant.

“Rotten with it,” Fairchild answered. He got a bottle from the suitcase and rose to his feet and held the bottle against the light, gloating. “She owns plantations or something, don’t she, Julius? First family, or something like that?”

“Something like that,” the Semitic man agreed. “She is a northerner, herself. Married it. I think that explains her, myself.”