Baroudi had been brought up in an atmosphere of Anglophobia.  His father, though very rich, had lost place and power through the English.  He had once had the upper hand with many of his countrymen.  He had the upper hand no longer, would never have it again.  The opportunity to plunder had been quietly taken from him by the men who wore the helmet instead of the tarbush, and who, while acknowledging that there is no god but God, deny that Mohammed was the Prophet of God.  He hated the English, and he taught his half-Greek son to hate them, but never noisily or ostentatiously.  And Baroudi learnt the lesson of his father quickly and very thoroughly.  He grew up hating the English, and yet, paradoxically, developing a nature in which were certain characteristics, certain aptitudes, certain affections shared by the English.

He was no lethargic Eastern, unpractical, though deviously subtle, taking no thought for the morrow, uselessly imaginative, submissive, ready to cringe genuinely to authority, then turn and kick the man below him.  He was no stagnant pool with only the iridescent lights of corruption upon it.  Almost in the English sense he was thoroughly manly.  He had the true instinct for sport, the true ability of the thorough sportsman.  He was active.  He had within him the faculty to command, to administrate, to organize.  He had, like the Englishman, the assiduity that brings a work undertaken to a successful close.  He had will as well as cunning, persistence as well as penetration.  From his father he had inherited instincts of a conquering race—­therefore akin to English instincts; from his mother, who had sprung from the lower classes, that extraordinary acquisitive faculty, that almost limitless energy, regardless of hardship, in the pursuit of gain which is characteristic of the modern Greek in Egypt.

But he had also within him a secret fanaticism that was very old, a fatalism, obscure, and cruel, and strange, a lack of scruple that would have revolted almost any Englishman who could have understood it, an occasional childishness, rather Egyptian than Turco-Egyptian, and a quick and instinctive subtlety that came from no sunless land.

He prayed, and was a sensualist.  He fasted, and loved luxury.  He could control his appetites, and fling self-control to the winds.  But in all that he did and left undone there was the diligent spirit at work of the man who can persevere, in renunciation even as in pursuit.  And that presence of the diligent spirit made him a strong man.

That he was a strong man, with a strength not merely physical, Mrs. Armine swiftly realized.  He told her of his father and mother, but he did not tell her of the atmosphere in which he had been brought up.  He told her of his father’s large fortune and wide lands, of his own schemes, what they had brought him, what they would probably bring him in the future; of certain marvellous coups which he had made by selling bits of land he had possessed