"'Greek?' I enquired. He flushed dark red.
"'Scarcely,' he said in a suppressed sort of voice. I won't bother you with local animosities. We are Spanish Jews. Not very good ones, perhaps, but we keep to ourselves and manage to keep the wolf from the door. And now,' he said with a brisk yet courteous movement of his hand to my arm, 'who the blazes are you, and what do you want to know?'
"I told him succinctly, and he nodded to each fact of importance as he took it in.
"'Mind you,' I told him, 'I don't defend her behaviour. She shouldn't have told her father she was married when she wasn't. He might have----' Doctor Sadura made a gesture of flinging something away impatiently.
"'Oh, pardon me, but it wouldn't have made any difference with that old humbug.' I looked at him in amazement.
"'I said humbug,' he insisted. 'A thorough old humbug. Do you know what he's suffering from? Illusions of grandeur, we call it in the profession. A form of megalomania. Oh, yes, he's got some money, no doubt, or I shouldn't render him professional services. But he thinks he owns the whole country clear up to Uskub. Burbles away for hours to me about his plans for developing the territory. He's got a lot of concessions that aren't worth the paper they are printed on. What's the use of concessions when the government's going in and out like a wheezy old concertina, when the agriculturalists simply wouldn't know what he was talking about and would come out with long knives and sickles and slash his developing parties about the legs? Rubbish! Illusions of grandeur, I tell you. As for the girl, you know her better than I do. The man who protected her, Kinaitsky, is a very fine chap indeed, but he isn't the sort of person I'd introduce to my sisters, if you know what I mean. Distinctly not.'
"'And yet I understand he married a Jewess not long ago,' I said.
"'Yes, very rich. Quite a different matter. Immense tobacco properties. You see, although he is not an Ottoman, his family have lived under Ottoman government so long that they are strong supporters of the old régime. They are like us Jews. They are good business men and they lend the old Ottoman families money in return for franchises which are very profitable to people with affiliations in Paris and London, and so forth. I don't say it's a perfect system,' Doctor Sadura went on, 'but it suits the country.'