Page:Englishwomaninan00elli.pdf/329

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

lad—to say Vive la Grèce, Vive Venizelos, and when he refused, they shot him."

"But what of the old man?"

"It broke his heart. One day he just fell asleep and did not wake again."

The harem door is still open. The little daughter, now thirteen, still calls me Tezajim (dear Aunt), and we find seats on the marble veranda to wait for the sun to set over the shores of the Marmora.

"How often I think of you," murmured my little sister, "trying and trying, day after day, to paint our sunset." And when I repeated that to the late Sir Alfred East he laughed heartily, saying, "Dear child, Turner could not have done it?"

And who has taken the place of my attendant, Miss Chocolate? The slim figure of a coal-black negress appears to answer my question, robed in brown velvet, with a brown velvet toque. I must call her Miss Ink, though her name is Mary.

I lunch with my Turkish sister as often as the poor sick woman can spare her, and she is generous. Yet eighteen of her friends are there already. This time my friend wears a fur coat and a black veil with lace over it. "Fancy calling that a veil, I teased her. Yet I can count the steps taken in the progress of Turkish women by our lunches. The first time I came to Turkey, you wanted to go up in a lift, and though your father said neither 'yea' nor 'nay,' you did not go. The second time you often used the lift. The third time, we lunched at Tokatlian's restaurant, 'for ladies only.' Now you lunch unveiled (I don't call that a veil) in a mixed restaurant.

"And yet, now you have won the privilege for which you have been waiting so many years, you prefer to lunch 'with the ladies.' How like a woman!"