subtle cream colour very far removed from the warm brown of her
Egyptian mother, but yet not white. At night it appeared
dazzling, for she enhanced its smooth, creamy pallor with a
wonderful liquid solution which came from Paris. It was hard,
Zahara had learned, to avoid a certain streaky appearance, but
much practice had made her an adept.

This portion of her toilet she had already completed and studying
her own reflection she wondered, as she had always wondered, what
Agapoulos could see in Safiyeh. Safiyeh was as brown as a berry;
quite pretty for an Egyptian girl, as Zahara admitted scornfully,
but brown--brown. It was a great puzzle to Zahara. The mystery
of life indeed had puzzled little Zahara very much from the
moment when she had first begun to notice things with those big,
surprising blue eyes of hers, right up to the present twenty-
fourth year of her life. She had an uneasy feeling that Safiyeh,
who was only sixteen, knew more of this mystery than she did.
Once, shortly after the Egyptian girl had come to the house of
Agapoulos, Zahara had playfully placed her round white arm
against that of the more dusky beauty, and:

"Look!" she had exclaimed. "I am cream and you are coffee."

"It is true," the other had admitted in her practical, serious
way, "but some men do not like cream. All men like coffee."

Zahara rested her elbows upon the table and surveyed the
reflection of her perfect shoulders with disapproval. She had
been taught at her mother's knee that men did not understand
women, and she, who had been born and reared in that quarter of