CHAPTER VIII.
"He'll forgive anyone who brings him whiskey." You remember, of course, that line that Shakespeare put into the mouth of Puck?
"What fools these mortals be!" The biggest fools are the extra smart ones, whose pride and peculiar joy it is to "beat the game." Yussuf Dakmar assessed all other humans as grist for his mill.

Character to him was expressed in degrees of folly and sheer badness.

Virtue existed only as a weakness to be exploited.

The question that always exercised him was, wherein does the other fellow's weakness lie?
It's a form of madness.

Where a sane man looks for strength and honesty that he can yoke up with, a Yussuf Dakmar spies out human failings; and whereas most of us in our day have mistaken pyrites for fine gold, which did not hurt more than was good for us, he ends by mistaking gold for dross.
You can persuade such a man without the slightest difficulty that you are a fool and a crook.