This portion of her toilet she had already completed and studying her own reflection she wondered, as she had always wondered, what Agapoulos could see in Safiyeh.  Safiyeh was as brown as a berry; quite pretty for an Egyptian girl, as Zahara admitted scornfully, but brown—­brown.  It was a great puzzle to Zahara.  The mystery of life indeed had puzzled little Zahara very much from the moment when she had first begun to notice things with those big, surprising blue eyes of hers, right up to the present twenty-fourth year of her life.  She had an uneasy feeling that Safiyeh, who was only sixteen, knew more of this mystery than she did.  Once, shortly after the Egyptian girl had come to the house of Agapoulos, Zahara had playfully placed her round white arm against that of the more dusky beauty, and: 

“Look!” she had exclaimed.  “I am cream and you are coffee.”

“It is true,” the other had admitted in her practical, serious way, “but some men do not like cream.  All men like coffee.”

Zahara rested her elbows upon the table and surveyed the reflection of her perfect shoulders with disapproval.  She had been taught at her mother’s knee that men did not understand women, and she, who had been born and reared in that quarter of Cairo where there is no day but one long night, had lived to learn the truth of the lesson.  Yet she was not surprised that this was so; for Zahara did not understand herself.  Her desires were so simple and so seemingly natural, yet it would appear that they were contrary to the established order of things.

She was proud to think that she was French, although someone had told her that the French, though brave, were mercenary.  Zahara admired the French for being brave, and thought it very sensible that they should be mercenary.  For there was nothing that Zahara wanted of the world that money could not obtain (or so she believed), and she knew no higher philosophy than the quest of happiness.  Because others did not seem to share this philosophy she often wondered if she could be unusual.  She had come to the conclusion that she was ignorant.  If only Harry Grantham would talk to her she felt sure he could teach her so much.

There were so many things that puzzled her.  She knew that at twenty-four she was young for a French girl, although as an Egyptian she would have been considered old.  She had been taught that gold was the key to happiness and that man was the ogre from whom this key must be wheedled.  A ready pupil, Zahara had early acquired the art of attracting, and now at twenty-four she was a past mistress of the Great Craft, and as her mirror told her, more beautiful than she had ever been.

Therefore, what did Agapoulos see in Safiyeh?

It was a problem which made Zahara’s head ache.  She could not understand why as her power of winning men increased her power to hold them diminished.  Safiyeh was a mere inexperienced child—­ yet Agapoulos had brought her to the house, and Zahara, wise in woman’s lore, had recognized the familiar change of manner.