may well imagine that this anxiety of Carrigaholt to purchase not
only the scenery, but the many dramatis personae belonging to his
dreams, with all their goodness and graces complete, necessarily
gave an immense stimulus to the trade and intrigue of Smyrna, and
created a demand for human virtues which the moral resources of the
place were totally inadequate to supply. Every day after breakfast
this lover of the good and the beautiful held a levee, which was
often exceedingly amusing. In his anteroom there would be not only
the sellers of pipes and slippers and shawls, and such like
Oriental merchandise, not only embroiderers and cunning workmen
patiently striving to realise his visions of Albanian dresses, not
only the servants offering for places, and the slave-dealer
tendering his sable ware, but there would be the Greek master,
waiting to teach his pupil the grammar of the soft Ionian tongue,
in which he was to delight the wife of his imagination, and the
music-master, who was to teach him some sweet replies to the
anticipated sounds of the fancied guitar; and then, above all, and
proudly eminent with undisputed preference of entree, and fraught
with the mysterious tidings on which the realisation of the whole
dream might depend, was the mysterious match-maker, {9} enticing
and postponing the suitor, yet ever keeping alive in his soul the
love of that pictured virtue, whose beauty (unseen by eyes) was
half revealed to the imagination.

You would have thought that this practical dreaming must have soon
brought Carrigaholt to a bad end, but he was in much less danger
than you would suppose; for besides that the new visions of
happiness almost always came in time to counteract the fatal
completion of the preceding scheme, his high breeding and his
delicately sensitive taste almost always came to his aid at times