“Why?”

“I want to find out if I can be of any good to you.”

“You can’t.  I don’t even know why you wish to.  But you can’t.”

“We’ll leave that,” she said, with inflexible composure.  “I don’t much care what you think about it.  I shan’t be governed, or affected even, by that.  The point is, I mean you to come.  How are you to come, surreptitiously or openly, sneaking in by-ways, your real name concealed, or treading the highway, your real name known?  For your own sake it must be openly and with your own name, and for my sake too.  You need to face your great tragedy, to stand right up to it.  It’s your only chance.  A man is always pursued by what he runs away from; he can always make a friend of what he stands up to.”

“A friend?”

His voice broke in with the most piercing and bitter irony through the many noises in the room—­sounds of cries, of carriage wheels, of horses’ hoofs ringing on an uneven pavement, of iron shutters being pulled violently down over shop fronts, of soldiers marching, of distant bugles calling, of guitars and mandolins accompanying a Neapolitan song.

“Yes, a friend,” said the husky and inflexible, but very feminine voice, which resembled no other voice of woman that he had ever heard.  “So much for my thought of you.  And now for my thought of myself.  I am a woman who has faced a great scandal and come out of it the winner.  I was horribly attacked, and I succeeded in what the papers call reestablishing my reputation.  You and I know very well what that means.  I know by personal experience, you by the behavior of your own wife.”

Dion moved abruptly like a man in physical pain, but Mrs. Clarke continued: 

“I don’t ask you to forgive me for hurting you.  You and I must be frank with each other, or we can be of no use to each other.  After what has happened many women might be inclined to avoid me as your wife did.  Fortunately I have so many friends who believe in me that I am in a fairly strong position.  I don’t want to weaken that position on account of Jimmy.  Now, if you came to Buyukderer under an assumed name, I couldn’t introduce you to any one, or explain you without telling lies.  Gossip runs along the shores of the Bosporus like fire along a hayrick.  How can I be seen perpetually with a man whom I never introduce to any of my friends, who isn’t known at his own Embassy?  Both for your own sake and for mine we must be frank about the whole thing.”

“But I never said I should come to Buyukderer,” he said.

And there was a sort of dull, lifeless obstinacy in his voice.

“You have come to Constantinople and you will come to Buyukderer,” she replied quietly.