On showing my host the paragraph, he observed, "When M. Perrot was here, my father owned this house. I remember the circumstance well. I was in the room when M. Perrot asked my father to introduce him to my mother. I suppose my parent was under the impression that in Europe you keep your wives for your guests; but anyhow we keep our wives for ourselves."
"What!" I inquired, "would you not introduce me to your sisters or mother?"
"No, certainly not."
Mr. Vankovitch here interposed with the remark that on the following day my host's niece was to be affianced to her future husband; that the bridegroom had not set eyes upon the face of his intended, and no one in Yuzgat, save her own immediate relatives, had ever seen the young lady.
"Well," I inquired, "and if the wife of an Armenian is unfaithful to him, can he obtain a divorce?"
"No," replied my host; "our religion does not allow of such a step; he does not even see his wife's face before marriage."
"Then he has no opportunity of studying her character, and she has no opportunity of studying his."
"No."
"They are a set of fools," said Vankovitch to me in Russian, this language not being understood by the proprietor. "They think that by shutting up their wives, they can keep them out of mischief, but the husbands are very much mistaken."
"We need not be surprised at it," he continued; "an Armenian lady is in no way educated. She is confined in a harem. She is the slave of her husband, and has to do all sorts of menial work for him—wash his feet, rub them dry, and wait at table. From her earliest childhood a girl is brought up to consider herself as a slave in her father's house; until the Armenians abandon these barbarous customs, their so-called Christianity will not do them much good. A Turkish husband has no difficulty in obtaining a divorce—in fact he is not even put to the expense of going to a court of law. All he has to do is to say, in the presence of a witness, 'I renounce you,' and he is at once freed from his wife, who is at liberty to go where she likes, and marry whomsoever she pleases."