the season regard themselves rather as a family
party. The beach is private, and a bathing costume is rather a rarity.
It is an amazing testimony to the simplicity of the Russian that
the upper classes behave at the seaside with little more
self-consciousness than the peasant children by the village stream.
When Ghilendzhik is commercialised to a Russian Brighton it will be
difficult to imagine what an Eden it once was.

I had looked forward to my arrival, for I had a Russian friend there,
living for the summer in her own datcha, and I had received a very
warm invitation to stay there some days.

The welcome was no less warm than the invitation. I arrived one
evening all covered with dust, my face a great flush of red from the
sun, my limbs agreeably tired. The house was a little white one on the
very edge of the sea. Part of the verandah had lately been washed away
in a storm, so close was the datcha to the waves. I went in, washed,
clad myself in fresh linen--the road-stained clothes were taken away
with a promise of return clean on the morrow--borrowed some slippers,
and sitting in an easy-chair on the verandah, lounged happily and
chatted with my hostess.

Varvara Ilinitchna is a Russian of the old type--you don't find many
of them nowadays, most of her friends would add--simple, quickwitted,
full of peasant lore, kind as one's own mother, hospitable as those
are hospitable who believe from their hearts that all men are
brothers.

I was introduced to all the neighbours, to the visitors and the
natives, and of course invested with much importance as one who wrote
books, had no fear, who even intended pilgrimaging to Jerusalem.

"You sleep under the open sky--that means you have outlived fear,"
said Varvara Ilinitchna with some innocence.

Our next-door neighbour was a beautiful Greek girl, a veritable Helen,
for the sake of whose beauty one might give up all things. Young,
elegant, serpentine; clad in a single garment, a light cinnamon gown
clasped at the waist; no stockings, her legs bare and brown; on her
head a Persian scarf embroidered with red and gold tinsel; her face
white, with a delicate pink flush over it; hair and eyes black as
night, but also with a glitter of stars. Wherever she walked she was a
picture, and whether she was working about the house, or idling with
a cigarette on the verandah, or running over the sand to spank
mischievous boys who had been trespassing, she was delicately
graceful,