seemed to say that Hector was taking an unfair ad vantage of him and that it was thus his right to feel hurt and abused.
For be it remembered that he was an Oriental; not the type of Eastern potentate one sees so much in England and occasionally in New York, flashing the motley silk of his turban through the gray, stony thoroughfares of the West, a man spoilt in a way yet bred to the most delicate finesse of feelings and manners and emotions; but that he, Abderrahman Yahiah Khan, was an Oriental born and bred in the gutters of some reeking bazaar, who had lived the haphazard life of Eastern childhood with no lessons except those of his ancient race, the crooked, crowded streets, and once in a while a word of meaningless Koranic wisdom from the lips of some supercilious graybeard. When he had reached his twelfth year, manhood had come to him—sudden and a little cruel, as it comes to the children of Asia—and with it both the passions and the responsibilities of manhood. Hereafter he had had to make his own way—his own way compared to which that of a New York newsboy is a path of roses, since the West holds firm to that weakening philosophy called sympathy of which the East knows nothing and wants less—through the strength of his brain and his body, every step on the ladder of success marked by the blood and sufferings of some one weaker than himself, until to-day he was what he was—shrewd, but callous; a man whose enthusiasm was without warmth, whose brutality with out imagination, whose passion without delicacy, whose submission without shame.
