Life in the Capital
These were charming people, full of gay and genuine
friendliness, and evidently pitying me as a captive in a
foreign land. The mother, fat, plain, and fresh-com-
plexioned, told me she came to me for love of the Lady
Mary, " a woman to be honoured," and begged me to
see much of her and her daughters.
" If it were not that we are suspected of loving the British
too much, we would do more for you: it is not our hearts
that are unwilling," said she, and invited me to the house
near-by.
" I have not a good room there," she apologized. " Every
time my husband marries a new wife, I am turned out into
an inferior room, and he has now three wives besides
myself. It is not very comfortable."
It was only a year, she explained, since they had a house
at all. They used to live in tents like everyone else, and
go down to Mansurabad on the edge of Iraq every winter:
but now they were settled, " and it is not so good a life,"
she sighed. The city people find it hard to realize how
much the winter and summer change of home make up for
all the discomforts of the nomad's housekeeping.
Twice a day, the Ajuzan came to call, and spent the rime
chatting and smoking, while his servant followed with a
small decanter of eau-de-vie flavoured with lemon rind,
which he deposited on the table.
" You do not take this, I know," he remarked, assum-
ing in the usual masculine way the negative virtues of
woman.
He had come to like it, said he, in Russia, where he had
travelled twice, and had learned to know European ladies,
and nearly married one who refused him at the last. Now
he had a Persian wife, but he never saw her. " She does not
count," he remarked, as if he were talking of a mortgage.