"My soul!" thought the girl swiftly, "they do get themselves up!"
The Captain had stepped forward, speaking quickly in Turkish, with a hard-sounding rattle of words. The sister glanced at him with a deepening of that curious air of mockery and let fall two words in the same tongue. Then she turned to Arlee.
"Je suis enchantée—d'avoir cet honneur—cet honneur inattendu——"
She did not look remarkably enchanted, however. The eyes that played appraisingly over her pretty caller had a quality of curious hardness, of race hostility, perhaps, the antagonism of the East for the West, the Old for the New. Not all the modernity of clothes, of manners, of language, affected what Arlee felt intensely as the strange, vivid foreignness of her.
"My sister does not speak English—she has not the occasion," the Captain was quickly explaining.
"Gracious" thought Arlee, in dismay. She had no illusions about her French; it did very well in a shop or a restaurant, but it was apt to peeter out feebly in polite conversation. Certainly it was no vessel for voyaging in untried seas. There were simply loads of things, she thought discouragedly, the things she wanted most to ask, that she would not be able to find words for.
Aloud she was saying, "I am so glad to have the honor of being here. I am only sorry that my French is so bad. But perhaps you can understand——"
"I understand," assented the Turkish woman, faintly smiling.
The Captain had brought forward little gilt chairs of a French design which seemed oddly out of place in this room of the East, and the three seated themselves. Out of place, too, seemed the grand piano which Arlee's eyes, roving now past her hostess, discovered for the first time.
"It was so kind of you," began Arlee again as the silence seemed to be politely waiting upon her, "to send your automobile for me."