They seemed to know nothing of the refinements of modern passion. For them it was a question of sex, without any admixture of social or racial distinctions. That Artemisia had had a lover in England was not a matter of amazement to them at all. What they couldn't understand was the reason why everything had to be driven underground. And the extremely _bourgeois_ conception of love culminating in a colourless civil contract between a good provider and a capable housekeeper, which was all they could see in American institutions--a civil contract which could apparently be shot to pieces upon any frivolous pretext, struck their mediæval minds as profoundly irreligious and unpleasant. "And then," said Mr. Spenlove, suddenly turning and savagely addressing the silent and recumbent forms in the darkness of the awning, "I made another astonishing discovery. They respected Captain Macedoine. A nice old gentleman! They thought he was fine! I give you my word, when they told me that, and proposed that we go right in and see him, I obtained a glimmer of what Nietzsche must have meant when he spoke of the transvaluation of all values. I was startled by the sudden realization of how tenaciously I had been holding to my belief in that man's essential unworthiness. You regard a man for years as despicable and rotten, judging him as though you were God, and then you meet a woman who worships the very ground he treads on, or a child to whom he is a fanatically fond parent. Of course, the enthusiasm of Monsieur Nikitos for his patron was discounted for by my low estimate of Nikitos himself. Possibly, I mused in a startled way, as we entered the dark ante-room of Captain Macedoine's abode, M. Nikitos was regarded by a septuagenarian mother as an angel of light. The possibility remains in suspense, for of that gentleman's antecedents I don't recall any particulars. I saw him again, as you shall hear, but he failed to prepossess me in his favour. He departed from my view, a perplexing and polysyllabic problem, claiming for himself a useless and preposterous purity. But perhaps it was not so useless from his point of view. Perhaps he owed his brief political omnipotence, when the whole country flamed into battle, murder, and sudden death, to his peculiar mania for a spectacular chastity. They say men fear such freaks, and deem them endowed with sinister supernatural powers. Possibly. There are strange things embedded in that fierce lava-flow of the Balkan volcanoes, congealed agonies and solidified monstrosities of soul.