ppy. In my simplicity I was feeling grateful to Alma for
having wrought this extraordinary change, so that when, on our arrival
at Port Said, my husband said,

"Your friend Madame Lier has made no arrangements for her rooms at
Cairo--hadn't I better telegraph to our hotel, dear?" I answered, "Yes,"
and wondered why he had asked me.

Our hotel was an oriental building, situated on an island at the further
side of the Nile. Formerly the palace of a dead Khedive, who had built
it in honour of the visit of an Empress, it had a vast reception hall
with a great staircase.

There, with separated rooms, as in London, we remained for three months.
I was enthralled. Too young and inexperienced to be conscious of the
darker side of the picture before me, I found everything beautiful. I
was seeing fashionable life for the first time, and it was entrancing.

Lovely and richly-dressed ladies in silk, velvet, lace, and no limit of
jewellery--the dark French women, the blonde German women, the stately
English women, and the American women with their flexuous grace. And
then the British soldiers in their various uniforms, the semi-Turks in
their red tarbooshes, and the diplomats of all nationalities, Italian,
Austrian, French, German--what a cosmopolitan world it was, what a
meeting-place of all nations!

Every hour had its interest, but I liked best the hour of tea on the
terrace, for that was the glorious hour of woman, when every condition
invested her dress with added beauty and her smile with greater charm.

Such a blaze of colour in the sunshine! Such a sea of muslin, flowers,
and feathers! Such lovely female figures in diaphanous clouds of
toilettes, delicate as gossamer and varied as the colours in the
rainbow! They were like a living bouquet, as they sat under the shade of
the verandah, with the green lawns and the palm trees in front, the
red-coated orchestra behind, and the noiseless forms of swarthy
Bednouins and Nubians moving to and fro.

Although I had been brought up in such a different world altogether I
could not help being carried away by all this beauty. My senses
burgeoned out and my heart seemed to expand.

As for Alma and my husband, they seemed to belong to the scene of
themselves. She would sit at one of the tea-tables, swishing away the
buzzing flies with a little whip of cord and cowries, and making
comments on the crowd in soft undertones which he alone seemed to catch.
Her vivid and searching eyes,