Page:A child of the Orient (IA childoforient00vakarich).pdf/125

Rh thought very unbecoming to girls. We used to call them Teeth.

It was there in the pines that we met Semmeya Hanoum. She was much older than any of us, and she ought to have been wearing the tchir-chaff, and to have been living in the seclusion of the haremlik; but her people were not very orthodox, and Semmeya had a way of her own of getting what she wanted, and what she wantedjust then was not to be secluded.

We never quite made up our minds about her. We had days when we knew we did not like her, for we did not consider her honourable. She would rather cheat at games than play fair, and she would always tell a fib to get out of a disagreeable predicament. Again there were days when we almost loved her for she was very fascinating.

That year we were particularly unfortunate in doing things we ought not to have done. In many of these—until Semmeya brought her clever mind to bear—we seemed hopelessly entangled. For example, when we stole grapes from a vendor who had fallen asleep. We did not mean to steal: we only thought of how wonderfully exciting it was to walk up on tip-toe, reach the grapes, get a bunch, and slip away without awakening the vendor. Semmeya and Djimlah and Chakendé and I accomplished it successfully. As Nashan was