She smiled and her teeth gleamed, like some forgotten sprig of jasmine in a garden where all the trees have been uprooted. “You’ve got a prestigious position now,” she said. “People realize that you’ve been nominated for senior posts. Ali Bey5 Sulaiman understands these things very well. And besides, he’s your relative. He loved your late father more than anything else in the world.”

All this was true. Ali Bey Sulaiman was his father’s cousin, on a side of the family tree that was otherwise bare. Rich and from a rich background, he was also an influential justice, quite apart from the fact that he was a Palace man. Once Isa strengthened his position by becoming the Bey’s son-in-law, he would be able to depend upon his father-in-law for a convenient harbor to shelter in whenever his boat was rocked by political storms—an important consideration since the losses he would suffer from remaining with the party seemed likely to outlast any possible gains. And besides, Salwa was really a marvelous girl. There was no comparison between her and his other cousin, whose family had been trying for ages to get him to marry her. Salwa’s mother was a fine woman too; she tended to a conservatism rare among people of her class. Fortunately for Isa, she thought very well of his future prospects, to such an extent that she could envisage him as a minister even before he himself could: when he had broached the subject of asking for her daughter’s hand, she had told him quite frankly that she was not interested in money but in status. And wasn’t the second grade34 a real sign of distinction for a young man in his thirties? She had a particular admiration for young men who had studied abroad, and even though he had not done so himself, he had still served for a year in the London embassy and traveled as an attaché with the secretariat of the delegation to the treaty negotiations. He liked to visualize Salwa’s enticing beauty, her crème-Chantilly complexion. It was just as well for him that she was not a socialite, one of those girls who went to clubs or had taken up modern ideas.

“Do you realize,” he asked his mother, “that I hadn’t seen her since we were children?”

“That’s your fault!” his mother retorted. “The fact that you were so involved in your work is no excuse either. Anyone with a relative like Ali Bey Sulaiman should have kept in as close contact as possible.”

“I used to meet him abroad, but I wasn’t thinking of marriage at that time.”