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Page 14
He waved to a stairway on the left, a small, steep affair, which
Arlee ascended slowly, a sense of strangeness mounting with her, in
spite of her confident bearing. She had not realized how odd it
would feel to be in this foreign house with the Captain at her
heels.
There was a door at the top of the stairs standing open into a long,
spacious room which seemed shrouded in twilight after the sunflooded
court. One entire side of the room was a brown, lace-like screen of
_mashrubiyeh_ windows; wide divans stretched beside them, and at the
end of the room, facing Arlee, was a throne-like chair raised on a
small dais and canopied with heavy silks.
By one of the windows a woman was squatting, a short, stout,
turbaned figure, striking a few notes on a tambourine and crooning
softly to herself in a low guttural. She raised her head without
rising, to look at the entering couple, and for a startled second
Arlee had the half hysterical fear that this squatting soloist was
the _triste_ and aristocratic representative of the _haut-monde_ of
Moslem which the Captain had brought her to see, but the next
instant another figure appeared in a doorway and came slowly toward
them.
Flying to the winds went Arlee's anticipations of somber elegance.
She saw the most amazingly vivid creature that she had ever laid
eyes on--a woman, young, though not in her first youth, penciled,
powdered, painted, her hair a brilliant red, her gown a brilliant
green. After the first shock of scattering amazement, Arlee became
intensely aware of a pair of yellow-brown eyes confronting her with
a faintly smiling and rather mocking interrogation. The dark of
_kohl_ about the eyes emphasized a certain slant _diabl�rie_ of line
and a faint penciling connected with the high and supercilious arch
of the brows. Henna flamed on the pointed tips of the fingers
blazoned with glittering rings, and Arlee fancied the brilliance of
the hair was due to this same generous assistance of nature.
"My soul!" thought the girl swiftly, "they _do_ get themselves up!"
The Captain had stepped forward, speaking quickly in Turkish, with a
hard-sounding rattle of words. The sister glanced at him with a
deepening of that curious air of mockery and let fall two words in
the same tongue. Then she turned to Arlee.
"_Je suis enchant�e--d'avoir cet honneur--cet honneur
inattendu----_"
She did not look remarkably enchanted, however. The eyes that played
appraisingly over her pretty caller had a quality of curious
hardness, of race hostility, perhaps, the antagonism of the East for
the West, the Old for the New. Not all the modernity of clothes, of
manners, of language, affected what Arlee felt intensely as the
strange, vivid foreignness of her.
"My sister does not speak English--she has not the occasion," the
Captain was quickly explaining.
"_Gracious_" thought Arlee, in dismay. She had no illusions about
her French; it did very well in a shop or a restaurant, but it was
apt to peeter out feebly in polite conversation. Certainly it was no
vessel for voyaging in untried seas. There were simply loads of
things, she thought discouragedly, the things she wanted most to
ask, that she would not be able to find words for.
Aloud she was saying, "I am so glad to have the honor of being here.
I am only sorry that my French is so bad. But perhaps you can
understand----"
"I understand," assented the Turkish woman, faintly smiling.
The Captain had brought forward little gilt chairs of a French
design which seemed oddly out of place in this room of the East, and
the three seated themselves. Out of place, too, seemed the grand
piano which Arlee's eyes, roving now past her hostess, discovered
for the first time.
"It was so kind of you," began Arlee again as the silence seemed to
be politely waiting upon her, "to send your automobile for me."
"Ah--my automobile!" echoed the woman on a higher note, and laughed,
with a flash of white teeth between carmined lips. "It pleased you?"
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