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you should disagree with him. He would not drop a subject, however
unimportant, till he had brought you round to his way of thinking.
The possibility that he could be mistaken never occurred to him. He
was the chap who knew. We sat at the doctor's table. Mr. Kelada
would certainly have had it all his own way, for the doctor was lazy
and I was frigidly indifferent, except for a man called Ramsay who
sat there also. He was as dogmatic as Mr. Kelada and resented bitterly
1
the Levantine's cocksureness. The discussions they had were
acrimonious and interminable.
Ramsay was in the American Consular Service and was
stationed at Kobe. He was a great heavy fellow from the Middle
West, with loose fat under a tight skin, and he bulged out of his
ready-made clothes. He was on his way back to resume his post,
having been on a flying visit to New York to fetch his wife who had
been spending a year at home. Mr.s Ramsay was a very pretty little
thing, with pleasant manners and a sense of humour. The Consular
Service is ill-paid, and she was dressed always very simply; but she
knew how to wear her clothes. She achieved an effect distinction. I
should not have paid any particular attention to her but that she
possessed a quality that may be common enough in women, but
nowadays is not obvious in thеir demeanour. You could not look at
her without being struck by her modesty. It shone in her like a flower
on a coat.
One evening at dinner the conversation by chance drifted to the
subject of pearls. There had been in the papers a good deal of talk
about the culture pearls which the cunning Japanese were making,
and the doctor remarked that they must inevitably diminish the value
of real ones. They were very good already; they would soon be
perfect. Mr. Kelada, as was his habit, rushed the new topic. He told us
all that was to be known about pearls. I do not believe Ramsay knew
anything about them at all, but he could not resist the opportunity to
have a fling at the Levantine, and in five minutes we were in the
middle of a heated argument. I had seen Mr. Kelada vehement and
voluble before, but never so voluble and vehement as now. At last
something that Ramsay said stung him, for he thumped the table and
shouted:

1
Levantine: житель Леванта (східна частина Середземномор’я)