"You will finish like my uncle Priam," she said. "One evening he balanced his accounts and discovered an enormous deficit, so he blew his brains out. The next day they found he had made a mistake in his calculations. He left my aunt Clytemnestra six million francs." The telephone bell rang. Lewis unhooked the receiver with an expressionless face, but his eyes hardened. "It's for you, darling," he said. He took umbrage at Irene's professional skill. He asked himself how she could be so self-sufficient. She was never late, and she received visits, drew up memoranda, answered letters and dictated reports without any apparent effort. Irene's office was always tidy, everything being cleared up at the end of each morning. Lewis' office was crammed with invoices and with memoranda vainly waiting for an answer. Irene was extremely generous in all her dealings ("Always give people plenty of rope," she said), especially when it was a question of dealing with Greeks. One felt that between Greeks there immediately arose a sort of understanding and that certain kinds of treachery were impossible. Lewis, on the other hand, had to travel alone, sword in hand, his eyes wide open, always on the alert in that atmosphere of western finance where bad faith predominates. Irene came from a long line of goldsmith bankers who dealt in actual bullion. Lewis belonged to a generation which believes only in industrial undertakings, and has never even seen gold, and he despised deposit banks and deposits themselves which, however, he had no scruples about re-investing as he thought fit, if necessary even against the wishes of his customers. Irene followed tradition, considered thrift as being almost holy, had great respect for debentures and Government securities, and took the trouble to buy Members of Parliament and the Press; "... to be a banker," she said, "is to observe a thousand strict laws and never to act rashly." Lewis, with feudal post-war pride, revolted from these slow methods: he was wrong. The union of politics and finance produce ugly children, but hardy ones. "Irene," he used to say, "you represent monopolies and extortion." "And you," she retorted, "stock jobbing and speculation."