“There! Now I can play at being a good little Turkish wife.” She fashioned into a fan the Matin newspaper, which I had bought for the luxurious purpose of not reading, and fanned me. “That is what Ayesha used to do to Hamdi. And Ayesha used to tell him stories. But my lord does not like his slave’s stories.”
“Decidedly not,” said I.
I have heard much of Ayesha, a pretty animal organism who appears to have turned her elderly husband into a doting fool. I am beginning to have a contempt for Hamdi Effendi.
“They are what you call improper, eh?” she laughed, referring to the tales. “I will sing you a Turkish song which you will not understand.”
“Is it a suitable song?”
“Kim bilir—who knows?” said Carlotta.
She began a melancholy, crooning, guttural ditty; but broke off suddenly.
“Oh! but it is stupid. Like the Turkish dancing. Oh, everything in Alexandretta was stupid! Sometimes I think I have never seen Alexandretta—or Ayesha—or Hamdi. I think I always am with you.”
This must be so, as of late she has spoken little of her harem life; she talks chiefly of the small daily happenings, and already we have a store of common interests. The present is her whole existence; the past but a confused dream. The odd part of the matter is that she regards her position with me as a perfectly natural one. No stray kitten adopted by a kind family could have less sense of obligation, or a greater faith in the serene ordering of the cosmos for its own private and peculiar comfort. When I asked her a while ago what she would have done had I left her on the bench in the Embankment Gardens, she shrugged her shoulders and answered, as she had done before, that either she would have died or some other nice gentleman would have taken care of her.
“Do you think nice gentlemen go about London looking for homeless little girls?” I asked on that occasion.