Both were young men.  Hadi Bey, who of course wore the fez, was a fine specimen of the smart, alert, cosmopolitan and cultivated Turk of modern days.  There was a peculiar look of vividness and brightness about him, in his piercing dark eyes, in his red lips, in his healthy and manly face with its rosy brown complexion and its powerful decided chin.  He had none of the sleepiness and fatalistic languor of the fat hubble-bubble smoking Turk of caricature.  The whole of him looked aristocratic, energetic, perfectly poised and absolutely self-possessed.  Many of the women in court glanced at him without any distaste.

Aristide Dumeny was almost strangely different—­an ashy-pale, dark-eyed, thin and romantic-visaged man, stamped with a curious expression of pain and fatalism.  He looked as if he had seen much, dreamed many dreams, and suffered not a little.  There was in his face something slightly contemptuous, as if, intellectually, he seldom gazed up at any man.  He watched Mrs. Clarke in the box with an enigmatic closeness of attention which seemed wholly impersonal, even when she was replying to hideous questions about himself.  That he had an interesting personality was certain.  When his eyes rested on the twelve jurymen he smiled every so faintly.  It seemed to him, perhaps, absurd that they should have power over the future of the woman in the witness-box.

That woman showed an extraordinary self-possession which touched dignity but which never descended to insolence.  Despite her obvious cleverness and mental resource she preserved a certain simplicity.  She did not pose as a passionate innocent, or assume any forced airs of supreme virtue.  She presented herself rather as a woman of the world who was careless of the conventions, because she thought of them as chains which prevented free movement and were destructive of genuine liberty.  She acknowledged that she had been a great deal with Hadi Bey and Dumeny, that she had often made long excursions with each of them on foot, on horseback, in caiques, that she had had them to dinner, separately, on many occasions in a little pavilion which stood at the end of her husband’s garden and looked upon the Bosporus.  These dinners had frequently taken place when her husband was away from home.  Monsieur Dumeny was a good musician and had sometimes sung and played to her till late in the night.  Hadi Bey had sometimes been her guide in Constantinople and had given to her the freedom of his strange and mysterious city of Stamboul.  With him she had visited the mosques, with him she had explored the bazaars, with him she had sunk down in the strange and enveloping melancholy of the vast Turkish cemeteries which are protected by forests of cypresses.  All this she acknowledged without the least discomposure.  One of her remarks to the cross-examining counsel was this: 

“You suggest that I have been very imprudent.  I answer that I am not able to live what the conventional call a prudent life.  Such a life would be a living death to me.”