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288 he seemed perfectly willing to spend the rest of his life: the primitive old fort, buried in the desert, three days by camel from Suez. He told her about his daily work there—generally settling Arab quarrels about camels, with an occasional murderer to be tried, with an incessant effort to better a little the material condition of the natives, with a periodical Turkish invasion to stir things up. He was building a dam now, he said, which would for the first time give a decent supply of water to the settlement, and in which he was much more interested than the natives themselves. He had some fear of being transferred to another post of more technical importance, in which case the work that he had begun would go for nothing.

"The shiftless beggars would never think of going on with it for themselves," he said. "They'd let it go to ruin, and be perfectly content with the discomforts of their grandfathers."

"Then why trouble yourself to give them something they don't really want?" asked Teresa.

"Because I'm like all reformers, cursed with a certain amount of surplus energy which I don't know how to direct in a more reasonable way. It would be better to spend it on myself—except that there's nothing I want."

"And you're content to live out there, out of the world, indefinitely? "