Paul sat up with a start and involuntarily cried, "No!"
Then he realized he had wounded his friend, and set about to transform the implied protest of the exclamation into mere surprised interest. Patrick accepted this, along with Paul's perfunctory congratulations, and loudly praised the young woman's qualities.
"She's a wonder," was the refrain. "Speaks every known tongue."
Paul had observed that Aïda avoided Mademoiselle. That told him more than Pat's loquacious eulogies. His next mission then loomed before him. He must prevent Patrick Coyle from running untrue to type.
Within a few days Paul was appointed salesman, with a small salary and liberal commission. It was decided he should occupy himself with dealers of European origin, leaving his employer free to concentrate his attention on the natives. From the first Paul felt hostility behind the ingenuous smiles of Mademoiselle Arzoumanian, and knew his appointment had been made in defiance of her counsels. He concluded that Pat counted on him to win the confidence of merchants who were put off by brusque Irish-American methods, and he smiled at the thought that he should be chosen to beguile the conventional: he whose whole life had been an ode to vagrancy! Yet it flattered him that the man of business had detected, through the welter of the mariner's personality, some guiding current, some consistency definite enough to warrant his being placed in the category of men capable of meeting conventionality on its own ground.
His new status obliged him to take stock of his qualifications. Business experience was lacking, but his knowledge of men was fairly sound. He had discovered that the best way to gratify one's curiosity about people
