"It's true. I regret it less than you think. It will be good for you to work, too.... You see you must do something useful. There cannot be two Europes, one living cleanly and well, and the other sleeping amongst lice and eating bark." "I seem to have married a copy of the 'Civil Progress.'" "Be generous. Don't wait until events prove to us that people must love each other. That sort of lesson costs too much." In the dusk she scanned Lewis' energetic features which had begun to fill out and to lose their character since he had given up working. "I have been telling myself that you, too, probably wanted to get your firm back into your own hands, but didn't like to suggest it because of me." Lewis hastened to be insincere. "Not at all. I was quite determined never to touch business again. Is there anything you have not lulled to sleep in me?" "I am anxious about you. What happens nowadays to those passions, those risks, all those forceful lines that once crossed your life? Are they all sleeping, to be stirred up one day against me?" "Don't be frightened. I soon forget." "Do you remember? You used to call the Bourse your playground." "I've grown a lot since then. I no longer require to play." "Tell me the truth. Have you never done a single piece of business since our marriage?" Lewis turned the handle of the radiator tap--an act which corresponds to the old-fashioned poking of the fire. " ... No," he answered. Outside the wind was droning and tattling the slates on the roofs. Lewis leant over Irene. "Well, let's see ... that is to say ... once, in Greece ... I don't think I ever told you ... I bought and sold the whole raisin crop of your island on margin." VIII SHORTLY afterwards the head office of the Apostolatos Bank in France was transferred from Marseilles to Paris. Irene accepted the appointment of general manager. The Greek firm was gradually giving up freighting and mercantile advances, and concentrating on big industrial undertakings and international finance. Thanks to this alteration of policy and to the amount of foreign capital they managed to attract, the shares of their affiliated companies, the "Olympic Chemical Produce Company" and the "Spartan Electricity Corporation" (for exploiting Thomson Houston systems in Peloponnesia), had doubled in value in a few months. The name of Apostolatos was, besides, "highly esteemed" in Paris, and the prize-bond drachma loan began to find its way on to the French market. There was only one shadow over all this prosperity, namely a strain in Græco-Italian relations arising from the seizure of a Greek steamship in the Adriatic, and which was in danger of having unpleasant results.