It had been two weeks since Jack Ryder had returned to camp.  Two interminable weeks.  They were the longest, the dullest, the dreariest, the most irritatingly undelighting weeks that he had ever lived through.

But bitterly he resented any aspersion from the long-suffering Thatcher upon his disposition.  He wanted it distinctly understood that he was not low-spirited.  Not in the least.  A man wasn’t in the dumps just because he wasn’t—­well, garrulous.  Just because he didn’t go about whistling like a steam siren or exult like a cheer leader when some one dug up the effigy of a Hathor-cow....  Just because he objected when the natives twanged their fool strings all night and wailed at the moon.

The moon was full now.  Round and white it went sailing blandly over the eternal monotony of desert....  Round and white, it lighted up the eternal sameness of life....  He had never noticed it before, but a moon was a poignantly depressing phenomenon.

He couldn’t help it.  A man couldn’t make himself be a comedian.  It wasn’t as if he wanted to be a grump.  He would have been glad to be glad.  He wanted Thatcher to make him glad.  He defied him to.

He didn’t enjoy this flat, insipid taste of things, this dull grind, this feeling of sameness and dullness that made nothing seem worth while....  A feeling that he had been marooned on a desert island, far from all stir and throb of life.

Suppose he did dig up a Hathor-cow?  Suppose he dug up Hathor herself, or Cleopatra, or ten little Ptolemies?  What was the good of it?

Not Jinny Jeffries herself could have cast more aspersions upon the personal value of excavations.

When he was tired of denying to himself that there was anything unusual the matter with him, he shifted the inner argument and took up the denial that anything which had happened in Cairo those two weeks before had anything to do with it.  As if that rash encounter mattered!  As if he were the silly, senseless sentimental sort of idiot to go mooning about his work because of a girl—­and a girl from a harem with a taste for secret masquerades and Turkish marriages!

As if he cared—!

Of course—­he admitted this logically and coldly now to himself, as he sat there in the ray of his excavator’s lantern, on the sanded floor at the end of the Hall of Offerings—­of course, he was sorry for the girl.  It was no life for any young girl—­especially a spirited one, with her veins bubbling with French blood.

The system was wrong.  If they were going to shut up those girls, they had no business to bring them up on modern ideas.  If they kept the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they ought to keep the kohl on their eyes and the henna on their fingers and education out of their hidden heads.

It was too bad....  But, of course, they were brought up to it.  Look how quickly that girl had given in.  She was Turkish, through and through.  Submissive.  Docile....  And a darned good thing she was, too!  Suppose she had taken him at his fool word.  Suppose she had really wanted to get away!