One night she approached my table and challenged me in French, at which I gave a noncommittal smile. I pretended that I did not know French. Then she tried indifferent German and I looked at her with puzzled blankness. Finally she spoke to me in a piquant English and I answered. She spoke English extremely well and it developed that she had been a choriphyée at the London Empire. I let the acquaintance grow leisurely. One night I found her in a fit of despondency, over a quarrel with her friend, Mlle. Balniaux. My subterfuge getting effective, I was just beginning to ply her with questions when a Turkish officer full of cognac wandered by and dropped a remark to her in French. It went against the grain for those swine to cast innuendoes to a white woman and forgetting my play acting, I told him his comments were uncalled for and advised him to draw in his horns a bit. After a little bluster to which I angrily replied in French, he disappeared, and, as I sat down at the table, Cecelia was looking at me with a queer smile. "I thought you did not understand French," she said. "I observe you have a pretty good Parisian accent." Then the full significance of my blunder came to me and I felt like the classic capricornus, meaning goat. She said she was tired of the Folies that night and suggested a drive. I called a careta and as we were driving down the boulevard I said to her: "Is this existence always pleasant? Is it not as it was with that officer, often unendurable?" She replied in a bantering tone, only half hiding a hurt undernote. "I'm getting used to it," she said. "A Turkish pig is no worse than an English cad or a German boor." The typical, philandering Broadway or Bond Street masher makes the physiological mistake of undervaluing the innate sense of decency inherent in every woman. Gentle courtesy and manners impress a courtesan by reason of the novelty. The inverse is often useful in dealing with a pampered society woman. Much to the annoyance of the Turkish officers, I often thereafter took the pretty Cecelia away from the Folies, after her performance, for a drive, and I began to compare her small confidences with certain bits of information that Kim had given me. I knew, or I could pretty well guess, that she was not staying in Constantinople, enduring the insults of those Turkish officers, simply for the money she could earn as a dancer. Then I made my second dramatic play for confidence. I suddenly stopped going to the Folies. I suppose it was rather lonesome in Constantinople and a man who was not a Turk was a novelty. One afternoon she sent for me and I was confronted with a human situation which I must in this narrative of Secret Service operations treat as impersonal though it is full of pathetic implications. I found her with her luggage packed. "Why haven't you come to the Folies lately?" she demanded with a pretty air of bossing the situation.