Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/89

609 naughty child in a tantrum, beating both fists in a pillow, kicking till my toes were bruised against the floor, and literally streaming tears. When I looked at my reflection in the mirror I saw my eyes were red and swollen and my cheeks a mass of anger-blotches. I washed my face with water from the goldfish pool, dried it on the cover of my bed and sat down sullenly to wait developments.

I had not long to wait. The tinkle-tonk of anklets sounded in the hall and two young women, one part Arab, the other black as only full-blood Sudanese can be, came in and greeted me with a profound temana, touching the floor, the knees, the heart, the lips and forehead, as they entered. "The Salute, O daughter of the house of Yousouf!"

"Get out o' here! I'm no one's daughter, and you know it" I began, but they paid no more attention than if I hadn't spoken. One of them slipped a pair of takoums—rocker-soled wooden sandals—on my feet, while the other swathed me in a pestemal, or silk-embroidered cotton bath-towel, till nothing but my head and feet were visible. When they'd wrapped me up till I was helpless as a mummy in its bindings they informed me that "if the honored lady is prepared, so is the bath," and ushered me down to the bathrooms.

There they took my hair down and arranged it in a coil on top of my head, binding it with a square of bright silk à la babushka. After that I sweltered in the hot room for an hour; then they laid me on a marble slab and sluiced me with great bucketfuls of water, first warm and soapy, finally clear and cold as ice. Then they kneaded me and rubbed me with sweet-smelling unguents, re-dyed my palms and soles and toes and fingers, gave fresh outline to my brows with a cosmetic pencil, beaded my eyelashes and rubbed my lids with ground antimony—kohl, they call it.

I felt exhilarated, positively radiant, as I clop-clopped in my wooden sandals back along the stone-paved corridors, and was almost satisfied with life—temporarily, at any rate—when they led me to the dressing-room.

Whatever else he was, old Yousouf Pasha was not niggardly. The dressing-room was stocked until it would have put the wardrobe mistress of a Broadway show to shame. It was a big room, and the walls were lined with six-foot chests of carven cedar, all full of feminine apparel. There were baggy pantaloons with ruffled bottoms, tight little jackets stiff with embroidery, dresses without number, scarves, shawls and veils, and in smaller cabinets of sandalwood was jewelry enough to pay a prince's ransom, anklets and bracelets, bangles and brooches, bandeaux, earrings, toe-rings, nose-rings in variety enough to make a regiment of women sparkle like the jewelry window of a ten-cent store.

When we were laboring through prescribed psychology in school I'd read in one of Weininger's monographs that women regard clothes entirely differently from men, that they receive a sort of psycho-sexual stimulus when beholding lovely clothing, whether on themselves or others, and think of clothes as part of them, rather than things to be put on and stripped off, as men do. I remember thinking that the statement was a lot of scientific bosh, but on this first day of my womanhood I knew how right the herr professor was. I thrilled until I felt as if I blushed all over when the slave-girls took those piles of gorgeous dresses from their chests; when they put the dress I'm wearing on me