“There is no end of your ‘supposing,’ but it is quite pretty.  I am half inclined to ‘suppose’ too.”  He took a sip of sherbet from the tall crystal goblet the servant had placed on a little three-legged stool beside him, and as he drank the cool liquid slowly, looked over the glass into my eyes, with a curious, half earnest, half smiling glance; I could not tell whether my enthusiastic picture of conjugal bliss amused him or attracted him, so I waited for him to speak again.

“Now that you have had your cruise in your ship of happiness on the waters of your cerulean imagination, permit me, who am land-born and a lover of the chase, to put my steed at a few fences in the difficult country of unadorned facts over which I propose to hunt the wily fox, matrimony.  I have never hunted a fox, but I can quite well imagine what it is like.

“In the first place, it is all very well to suppose that it had pleased Allah in his goodness to relieve me of my three incumbrances—­meanwhile, there they are, and they are very real difficulties I assure you.  Nevertheless are there means provided us by the foresight of the apostle, by which we may ease ourselves of domestic burdens when they are too heavy for us to bear.  It would be quite within the bounds of possibility for me to divorce them all three, without making any special scandal.  But if I did this thing, do you not think that my experience of married life has given me the most ineradicable prejudices against women as daily companions?  Am I not persuaded that they all bicker and chatter and nibble sweetmeats alike—­absolutely alike?  Or if I looked abroad—­”

“Stop,” I said, “I am not reasoner enough to persuade you that all women have souls.  Very likely in Persia and India they have not.  I only want you to believe that there may be women so fortunate as to possess a modicum of immortality.  Well, pardon my interruption, ’if you looked abroad,’ as you were saying?—­”

“If I looked abroad, I should probably discover little petty traits of the same class, if not exactly identical.  I know little of Englishmen, and might be the more readily deceived.  Supposing, if you will, that, after freeing myself from all my present ties, in order to start afresh, I were to find myself attracted by some English girl here”—­there must have been something wrong with the mouthpiece of his pipe, for he examined it very attentively—­ “attracted,” he continued, “by some one, for instance, by Miss Westonhaugh—­” he stopped short.

So my inspiration was right.  My little picture, framed as we rode homeward, and indignantly scoffed at by my calmer reason, had visited his brain too.  He had looked on the fair northern woman and fancied himself at her side, her lover, her husband.  All this conversation and argument had been only a set plan to give himself the pleasure of contemplating and discussing such a union, without exciting surprise or comment.  I had been suspecting it for some time, and now his sudden interest in his mouthpiece, to conceal a very real embarrassment, put the matter beyond all doubt.