He didn't enjoy this flat, insipid taste of things, this dull grind, this feeling of sameness and dullness that made nothing seem worth while.... A feeling that he had been marooned on a desert island, far from all stir and throb of life. Suppose he did dig up a Hathor-cow? Suppose he dug up Hathor herself, or Cleopatra, or ten little Ptolemies? What was the good of it? Not Jinny Jeffries herself could have cast more aspersions upon the personal value of excavations. When he was tired of denying to himself that there was anything unusual the matter with him, he shifted the inner argument and took up the denial that anything which had happened in Cairo those two weeks before had anything to do with it. As if that rash encounter _mattered_! As if he were the silly, senseless sentimental sort of idiot to go mooning about his work because of a girl--and a girl from a harem with a taste for secret masquerades and Turkish marriages! As if he cared--! Of course--he admitted this logically and coldly now to himself, as he sat there in the ray of his excavator's lantern, on the sanded floor at the end of the Hall of Offerings--of course, he was sorry for the girl. It was no life for any young girl--especially a spirited one, with her veins bubbling with French blood. The system was wrong. If they were going to shut up those girls, they had no business to bring them up on modern ideas. If they kept the mashrubiyeh on the windows and the yashmak on their faces they ought to keep the kohl on their eyes and the henna on their fingers and education out of their hidden heads. It was too bad.... But, of course, they were brought up to it. Look how quickly that girl had given in. She was Turkish, through and through. Submissive. Docile.... And a darned good thing she was, too! Suppose she had taken him at his fool word. Suppose she had really wanted to get away! Lucky, that's what he'd been. And it would be a lesson to him. Never again. No more masked young things with their stolen keys and their harem entrances. No more whispered tales of woe in a shady garden. No more-- Violently he wrenched himself from his No Mores. Recollection had a way of stirring an unpleasant tumult. But it was all over. He had forgotten it--he _would_ forget it. He would forget _her_. Work, that was the thing. Normal, sensible, every day work. But there was no joy in this tonic work. Somewhere, between a night and a morning, he had lost that glow of accomplishment which had buoyed him, which had made him fairly ecstatic over the discovery of this very tomb.