"Just like you English! Dunces! Excuse the word. I say what I think. You judge of the East by the West, and can’t see that force is the only thing these people understand. I stood it for five days, boiling all over inside, and then I went down to the Agency. ’Good gracious,’ I said, ’why has the Government allowed these men to slip through their fingers?’ And when Nuneham said he had laid a hundred and fifty of them by the heels, I said ’Tut! Taking water by drops will never fill the water-skin. You should have laid hold of a hundred and fifty thousand, and that man Ishmael above all. But you’ve let him go—him and his hundred messengers—and now you’ll have to take the consequences. Serve you right, too! What was the use of putting down the Arabic press if you let the Arabic preachers go unmolested?’" "What did he say to that, Princess?" "He said he had scotched the snake but he was not forgetting the scorpion. It’s no use talking, though. Nuneham is a great man, but he has lost his nerve, and is always asking himself what they are saying about him in England. Boobies in Parliament, I suppose, and he wants to be ready to reply to them. But, goodness me, if you throw a missile at every dog that barks at you the stones in your street will be as precious as jewels soon. Oh, I know! I’m a woman of experience." Helena was staring straight before her. "I see what is going to happen," said the Princess. "This man will sow sedition all over the country and meantime preach peace in Khartoum and throw dust in the eyes of Europe." "He is a scoundrel, a hypocrite——" "Of course he is, my dear, but when people are bad they always pretend that they want to make other people better." "Can the Government do nothing to stop him, to destroy him?" "No, my dear. There is only one thing that can do that now." "What?" "A woman!" "A woman?" "Why not? Follow the holy man no farther than his threshold, they say. But some woman always does so. Always!" Helena’s staring eyes with their far-away look had come back to the Princess’s face. The Princess was beating her hand and laughing. "You English think woman has no power in the East. Rubbish! She is more powerful here than anywhere else. Even polygamy gives her power—for a time, at all events. While she is first favourite she rules everything, and when she ceases to be that—" the Princess laughed again, closed her eyes, and said: "She who doesn’t take her revenge has an ass for uncle." Helena’s heart began to beat so violently that she could scarcely speak, but she said— "You mean that some woman will betray this man——" "What is more likely? They all fall that way sooner or later, my beauty. This one has taken a kind of vow of celibacy, they say, but what matter? When I was as young as you are there was nothing I loved so much as to meet with a man of that sort. It was child’s play, my darling." All the blood in Helena’s body was now boiling under the poison of a new thought.