Achmed Abdullah

“ Jane Champlin felt vaguely perturbed—not because she was fluttered by sympathy, but rather because of the fact that her mentality and her psychological reasoning did not seem wide enough to take in the strange, small, stark fact of Toussaint Piédevache: a man, preferring Paris, able to earn his living in Paris, yet a resident of Algiers for fifteen years and—as he had told her one day—expecting to live there always. ”

“ For he was not a romantic figure, with his solid bullet-head, his comfortable double chin, his little twinkling eyes, and his quick, metallic speech; and Jane said to herself, with a faint feeling of shame, that she should be able to dissect the character and motivations of Toussaint Piédevache into a few single and negligible elements with the same ease with which her learned first brother decomposed a force in a question of abstract dynamics.
If the cabman had been a gentleman she would have concluded that an affair of honor—or of dishonor—had driven him away from his beloved boulevards ”

“ At all events, it was quite natural that, when her aunt Priscilla died, leaving her an independent income, and when her father, the same year, took a second wife, Jane should go travelling—not to London or Paris or Berlin, but straight to what seemed to her the more respectable part of the Orient: namely Algiers.
She liked it from the first. She did not mind the fact that many of the people there were Sicilians and Malagans and Southern Frenchmen, and that a considerable percentage of the native-born Arabs wore patent leathers and drank absinthe. ”

“ She had no standard to measure him with, for her only standard was Herself— whatever ready-moulded principles, prejudices, and convictions her former social and intellectual activities had impregnated her with. ”