And he did, too. He saw, in his mind, a superb and curving shore of yellow sand encircling a sea of flawless azure. He saw a long line of white villas, white with biscuit-coloured balconies and green jalousies, rising amid gardens of laurel and palm; he saw white yachts rocking at anchor, and illuminated houseboats in the shadow of a great breakwater. He saw the spangled lights of a fairy city, a city filled with fabrics and jewels which he would buy for her. He saw all this, and in his mind the world had fought itself to a standstill and the cautious investor had come into his own. He saw the war-weary battalions returning to their toil, slaving to pay off the cost of their adventure. This was the way of the world as he knew it. It was no use blaming him: he merely took advantage of human need and folly, as we all do. He had been through wars before and knew the inevitable reactions, and the almost incredible cheapness of money that followed. He was by instinct one of those who, like camp-followers on a grand scale, prosper amid the animosities of simpler folk; persons who found fortunes upon great wars, as did the Jews in London after 1815 and the bourgeois bankers of Paris after the Revolution. And it surprised him how little his wife knew, how little she questioned the world in which she lived. Of course it was charming, and he was fascinated just because she had that amazing racial blindness to facts and lived in a fanciful world of her own. The English were all like that, it seemed to him. He put his arms about her. "In my mind I see it. You wait. Everything you can think of, all very fine." "Here in Saloniki?" "No!" "In England?" Mr. Dainopoulos laughed a little and shook his head. He was quite sure England wouldn't be any place for him after this war. In his own private opinion, there wouldn't be any England within ten years from now, which shows how logical and wide-awake Latins can make errors of judgment. In any case, there were too many Jews there. "Because I don't want to go to America," she remarked, still rumpling his hair.