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.
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