“They’re a picturesque couple,” explained Cuthbert.  “Ducret was originally a wrestler.  Used to challenge all comers from the front of a booth.  He served his time in the army in Senegal, and when he was mustered out moved to the French Congo and began to trade, in a small way, in ivory.  Now he’s the biggest merchant, physically and every other way, from Stanley Pool to Lake Chad.  He has a house at Brazzaville built of mahogany, and a grand piano, and his own ice-plant.  His wife was a supper-girl at Maxim’s.  He brought her down here and married her.  Every rainy season they go back to Paris and run race-horses, and they say the best table in every all-night restaurant is reserved for him.  In Paris they call her the Ivory Queen.  She’s killed seventeen elephants with her own rifle.”

In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women.  They were pallid, washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past middle-age.  For him women of any other type had ceased to exist.  He had come to think of every white woman as past middle-age, with a face wrinkled by the sun, with hair bleached white by the sun, with eyes from which, through gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had departed.  He thought of them as always wearing boots to protect their ankles from mosquitoes, and army helmets.

When he came on deck for dinner, he saw a woman who looked as though she was posing for a photograph by Reutlinger.  She appeared to have stepped to the deck directly from her electric victoria, and the Rue de la Paix.  She was tall, lithe, gracefully erect, with eyes of great loveliness, and her hair brilliantly black, drawn, a la Merode, across a broad, fair forehead.  She wore a gown and long coat of white lace, as delicate as a bridal veil, and a hat with a flapping brim from which, in a curtain, hung more lace.  When she was pleased, she lifted her head and the curtain rose, unmasking her lovely eyes.  Around the white, bare throat was a string of pearls.  They had cost the lives of many elephants.

Cuthbert, only a month from home, saw Madame Ducret just as she was—­a Parisienne, elegant, smart, soigne.  He knew that on any night at Madrid or d’Armenonville he might look upon twenty women of the same charming type.  They might lack that something this girl from Maxim’s possessed—­the spirit that had caused her to follow her husband into the depths of darkness.  But outwardly, for show purposes, they were even as she.

But to Everett she was no messenger from another world.  She was unique.  To his famished eyes, starved senses, and fever-driven brain, she was her entire sex personified.  She was the one woman for whom he had always sought, alluring, soothing, maddening; if need be, to be fought for; the one thing to be desired.  Opposite, across the table, her husband, the ex-wrestler, chasseur d’Afrique, elephant poacher, bulked large as an ox.  Men felt as well as saw his bigness.  Captain Hardy