r distress we discovered Avenue de l'Opera prices
on everything we wished. Each time that we went back the price was
different. The market seemed to fluctuate. One blue enamelled belt, upon
which I had set my heart, varied in price from one to three dollars each
time I looked at it. Finally, one day I hit upon a plan. I asked my
friend, Mile, de Falk, to follow me into this shop and not speak to me,
but to notice the particular belt I held in my hand. I then went out
without purchasing, and the next day my friend sent her sister, who
speaks nothing but Russian and French, to this shop. She purchased the
belt for ten dollars less than it had been offered to me. She ordered a
different lining made for it, and the shopkeeper said in guileless
Russian, "How strange it is that ladies all over the world are alike.
For a week two American young ladies have been in here looking at this
belt, and by a strange coincidence they also wished this same lining."

For once I flatter myself that I "did" a Russian Jew, but his
companions in crime have so thoroughly "done" me in other corners of the
world that I need not plume myself unnecessarily. He is more than even
with me.

All through Russia we contented ourselves with buying Russian
engravings, which are among the finest in the world. Perhaps some of
their charm is in the subject portrayed, which, being unfamiliar,
arouses curiosity. Russian operas, paintings, theatricals, the national
ballet, the interior of churches and mosques are different from those of
every other country. There is in the churches such a strange admixture
of the spiritual and the theatrical. So that the engravings of these
things have for me at least more interest than anything else.

Occasionally we were betrayed into buying a peasant's costume, an ikon,
or an enamel, but in Moscow and Kief, the only way that we could
reproduce to our friends at home the glories and splendours of these two
beautiful cities was by photographs, in which the brilliancy of their
colours brings back the sensations of delight which we experienced.

Shopping in Constantinople is not shopping as we Americans understand
it, unless you happen to be an Indian trader by profession. I am not.
Therefore, the system of bargaining, of going away from a bazaar and
pretending you never intended buying, never wanted it anyhow, of coming
back to sit down and take a cup of coffee, was like acting in private
theatricals. By nature I am not a di