clear-eyed young man, who spoke the many languages of the coast glibly,
and his own in the soft, detached voice of a well-bred Englishman. He
was in training to enter the consular service. Something in his poise,
in the assured manner in which he handled his white stewards and the
black Kroo boys, seemed to Everett a constant reproach, and he resented
him.

"They're a picturesque couple," explained Cuthbert. "Ducret was
originally a wrestler. Used to challenge all comers from the front of a
booth. He served his time in the army in Senegal, and when he was
mustered out moved to the French Congo and began to trade, in a small
way, in ivory. Now he's the biggest merchant, physically and every other
way, from Stanley Pool to Lake Chad. He has a house at Brazzaville built
of mahogany, and a grand piano, and his own ice-plant. His wife was a
supper-girl at Maxim's. He brought her down here and married her. Every
rainy season they go back to Paris and run race-horses, and they say the
best table in every all-night restaurant is reserved for him. In Paris
they call her the Ivory Queen. She's killed seventeen elephants with her
own rifle."

In the Upper Congo, Everett had seen four white women. They were pallid,
washed-out, bloodless; even the youngest looked past middle-age. For him
women of any other type had ceased to exist. He had come to think of
every white woman as past middle-age, with a face wrinkled by the sun,
with hair bleached white by the sun, with eyes from which, through
gazing at the sun, all light and lustre had departed. He thought of them
as always wearing boots to protect their ankles from mosquitoes, and
army helmets.

When he came on deck for dinner, he saw a woman who looked as though she