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am-coloured "woolly," a waterproof, and a wretched cheap collar of fur. Once she never stepped out of her house but into a car. Now in weather-beaten thin old boots she must tramp from place to place over the cobbles, living in one room with her family, washes the clothes herself, scrubs the floor, has no money. The women have won the unbounded admiration of the British in Constantinople. For pluck these Russian women would be hard to rival. But what a destiny! They spend their money, they sell their jewels and rings, they sell their clothes, they take out trays of chocolates to sell in the streets and shiver at the street-corners; to feed their children they sell more clothes. Hundreds of cases have been discovered in which the women are confined to their rooms, having sold almost all their wearing apparel, and having nothing in which to appear on the streets. The refugee peasantry and working class are mostly confined in barbed-wire internment camps outside the city, and guarded by Sengalese. Twenty per cent get permission to go into the city each day. The seventy or eighty thousand indigent Russians in Constantinople belong mostly to the upper classes. Very many belong to Petrograd society, and are people who fled to the Crimea and the Caucasus, were caught up in the Deniken or Wrangel panic, and transported hither. They are well-educated people, speaking English and French, and well-read and accomplished. But how little are those modern accomplishments when it comes to the elemental realities of life. A beautiful young countess is employed in a bakery to sell bread, and is lucky. An erstwhile lion and ex-general has a job in a laundry. Pride intervenes only to stop them begging. How few are the beggars! But you see the nicest of girls with pinched white faces trying to sell _loukoum_. Even hard Scotsmen passing by are fain to give them money and take nothing in return. You see the strangest vendors--children standing at a street corner trying to sell a blouse and a pair of boots, tatterdemalions trying to dispose of unsaleable rags, ex-students with heaps of textbooks trying to sell to those students who, despite everything, are still carrying on. When new boat-loads of refugees arrive, the street-selling is naturally augmented by a more hopeful crowd, and it was possible to see one day little bears with scarlet ribbons round their necks being offered for sale on the pavement, tiny baby-bears
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