Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ing an instant to exchange half a dozen words with one of the ' veiled,' would be considered most unseemly, even were it written on their foreheads that they were man and wife ; or, to speak more correctly, it would be looked upon as an audacious piece of impudence, as though two individuals should select the centre of one of our crowded streets in which to make mutual declarations of love. In this sense, then, Turkish women really have more freedom than ours, and no one knows how highly they value it or how eagerly they grasp at the noise and crowd and open air and light of the streets and public resorts. In their own houses they see but one single man, while their windows and gardens are like those in convents; so it is perfectly natural to find them running about the city with all the enjoyment of liberated prisoners. It is great fun to follow one of them at a safe distance and see how she has mastered the art of chopping the joys of vagrancy into the smallest possible pieces. First she will drop into the nearest mosque to say her prayers and loiter under the arches of the courtyard for a quarter of an hour or so, chatting with a friend; next she will go to the bazar, glance into half a dozen shops, turn one or two upside down, and finally, after purchasing some trifle, take the tramway down to the fish market, cross the bridge, and examine at her leisure every wig and headdress in every hair dresser's shop in the Rue de Pera; nextwe find her in a cemetery, where, after settling herself comfortably on one of the tombs, she will sit for some time munching sweetmeats; then back to the city and down to the Golden Horn again, making numberless devours to right and left, and watching everything out of the corner of her eye shop windows, signs, posters, the other ladies who pass her...
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