This man was understood to be a Pole in exile, though his title to that distinction could only have been on the side of the distaff, since his father's descent from a ducal family of Venice was not denied; but neither nationality nor expatriation was very obvious upon him. At first sight you would have supposed him a sallow Englishman, spare of flesh and too narrow in the chest; you might have put down his dead complexion and his leanness to India or Jamaica, and been inclined to attribute his dry cynicism to the same superfervent experience. But presently you would be alive to his hungry mind, to his hungry, raging air, his restless habit and large way of looking at circumstance--as if by no possibility could it be any concern of his. And then the trick he had of considering our people as Europeans, of dividing the races of the world by continents rather than kingdoms; and that other of judging all cases, including yours and his own, upon their merits--such traits, to an experienced mind, would have established him for a foreigner, one of a people who had had too much elbowing for breath to have time or space for prejudice or minute classification. Superficially, to be sure, he was English enough--from his speech to his tailoring; and his phlegm (of which we boast) was unassailable. Nobody knew much of his history; Bill Chevenix used to say that he was born whole, and thirty, out of an egg dropped upon our coasts by a migratory roc; that he stepped out, exquisitely dressed, and ordered a whisky and Apollinaris at the nearest buffet. This, said Chevenix, was his ordinary breakfast. When Sanchia objected that he might have stepped out in the afternoon, he replied that it also formed his usual tea, and, so far as he knew, was the staple of all his meals. “And cigarettes,” he added. “But he would have had those with him. I bet you what you like he came out smoking.”