Poyning fanned himself elegantly with his hat. 'There lies the whole pathos of the situation,' he said. 'I have none. My occupation up to this time has been merely the search for business, the quest of some small nook in the great world machine of labour. I may say that the quest has been diligently prosecuted, but utterly barren of result.' 'H'm. You cannot get a job.' 'The merchant princes of this land, sir, have been but very faintly impressed with the desirability of enlisting my services. In Shanghai--would you credit it?--I could scarce get them to believe I was not in jest; and here, too, beyond the offer of a post to pack frozen game in a warehouse--side by side, I believe, with native operatives--nothing whatever has presented itself. And I, gentlemen, took a first at the University of Oxford.' 'Come into this room,' said Philipson, leading the way. Poyning followed. On seeing the quartette of bottles on the table his eyes lit up. 'One who understands the art of living, I observe,' he said. 'And now, worthy Macedonian, what can I do to vent my gratitude for your most timely loan?' Philipson was staring at the youth very hard. 'Gift,' he corrected, shortly. 'Usury is not among my failings.' Poyning bowed again. 'And a bourgeois pride is not among mine,' he said. 'Gift be it called, then, which is the more noble, and moves me to livelier thanks. How can I translate them into action?' 'Wait here for a few moments,' said Philipson, moving suddenly to the door. 'Stay in this room, the pair of you, till I come back.' As soon as he was gone I motioned our visitor to a chair. 'You're a pretty cool hand,' I said. 'D'you always call people fancy names?' 'The wrathful Hebe, cupbearer to gods? The appellation was perhaps rather daring than apt.' 'For some reason best known to yourself you also called my friend "worthy Macedonian."' He screwed a glass into his eye and rounded on me with an expression of astonishment--whether feigned or genuine I couldn't tell. 'Dear me,' he said, 'can it be that the allusion was lost upon you? And yet you would appear from your externals to be a man of some culture.' 'May be,' I said, nettled at his bland impudence, 'but what has that to do with it?' 'Possibly your studies have at some time or other taken you into that temple of learning known as the British Museum?' 'They have, but I still don't see what the devil you're driving at.' 'Curious,' observed Poyning. 'The Grecian type of your friend's beauty--our friend's, if I may say so--is so marked that it struck me at once. An idle fancy of mine, of course, but the reason I addressed him as worthy Macedonian was that his features bear a perfect resemblance to the busts of Alexander the Great.' CHAPTER IV THE QUEER EPISODE AT NANKING