urs. No anxieties now, no jealousies, no fears for the future.
They are not like some of those feminine taskmasters who take entire
possession of you, forcing you to follow the adored object to the
theatre, or take it to the ball, in order to have the pleasure of
watching it flirting bare-shouldered with some intimate friend, who will
perhaps be its next lover. No, in my _role_ of sultan my amours are
modestly hidden from profane eyes in the recesses of my harem, and there
I am always welcome whenever I choose to come. I keep the key in my
pocket. At any hour of the day or night I can go there in my quality of
owner without having to leave my club, my friends, my work, or my
amusements a moment earlier than I desire.

Such, then, is the "anxious existence" which you attribute to me. Find
me a husband who can act in the same way.

Still, as might have been foreseen, great changes have taken place in
the internal arrangements of my household, where it became necessary
that the Turkish elements should be partially replaced by others more
adapted to the exigencies of western civilization.

A memorable event has occurred.

Hadidje, Nazli, and Zouhra went the other day to the opera. It is
needless to say that I was there. I must admit that their nervousness
was so extreme at making this bold experiment that, watching them from
my own stall as they came in, I thought for a moment that they were
going to run away again.

Already in their walks they were getting into training, and in regard to
their veils exhibited a certain amount of coquetry; but now it became
necessary to disregard the law of Mahomet entirely. They had never seen
the inside of a theatre before, so you can imagine that when they found
themselves in the box, with their unveiled faces exposed to the gaze of
a multitude of infidel eyes, all the bold resolutions which they had
made for this decisive effort were put to the rout. Strange as such
Mohammedan bashfulness may seem to us, they felt, as they afterwards
told me, that appearing there unveiled, was "just like exhibiting
themselves naked."

However, as soon as this first impression was overcome, thanks chiefly
to the exhortations of Mohammed, who was almost at his wits' ends to
manage them, they succeeded in putting on sufficient assurance to
dissemble their very sincere dread, so that at a distance it looked
merely like excessive shyness. The lifting of the curtain for the first
act of "Don Juan" fort