Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/103

 black surface of the desert. Then, at midnight, three hours of tantalizing sleep broken so soon by the wise old guide standing in the door of the tent crying, 'Oh, master, if we linger we shall die.'

Oases with camels lying about, looking from a distance like 'teapots.' Tall, speechless women of the Badaweens, shrouded like ghosts standing sometimes six feet in their sandals. Patriarchs such as these solitary places have always bred since the days of Abraham.

He stood before her, clothed in the glory of his strange, bold life. The infinite spaces stretched behind him and the awful power of life and death was in his hard, square hands. In the sadness of his eyes and the silent disillusionment of his mouth was a philosophy older and deeper than taught by Mr. Emerson, who sat but three seats away. Under the compulsion of the smooth, low voice she felt little by little the moorings of her soul breaking and leaving her free to float off down some dreadful and beautiful river.

She was frightened by her own absorption, and tried to pull herself back. She said to herself desperately, 'If I fall in love with him it will kill me. I can't! I can't!'—and stared at him rather grimly. He was only a young Englishman in what she contemptuously called 'fancy dress,' advertising his new book and making money to go back to a country which, after all, seemed to be a travelling pigsty where no Christian 'man of principles' would want to live. She decided that all that was attractive about him was Arabia, and that Arabia was filthy. Its ro-