My contract with the newspaper! It was “deliver the goods and your reward shall be handsome.” The goods, indeed, are delivered and, in a fashion, made public. They have not, however, been acknowledged as “woman’s work,” and the reward seems still far to seek! I had not supposed that in journalism “the sex” must suffer the double loss of justice and credit. The articles were certainly not stamped with any plain mark of a _feminine_ special correspondent. Unfortunately, we are not in Turkey! where women’s achievements have still the “novelty” that can command a fine flourish of trumpets, where no cry has been needed of “equal work—equal pay!” Had I foreseen, should I then have returned to punish ingratitude? I think not. At such a moment I could not forego the most thrilling chapter of the story that has held me for so many years; ever since, indeed, I used to climb on the knee of the dear being whose name I bear, to hear him tell of his journeyings to those Eastern lands—Japan and China, India and Moslem Turkey. Many curious interpretations have been put upon my interest in these peoples. The Turks themselves have wondered how it came about. It is because they had been my friends long years before I ever set foot on their now familiar land. Its colours, its beauty, its glorious summers and sunsets, the fine thought and philosophy of its high-minded, sober people, were known to me in the nursery, as only a child can live in the imaginations stirred by those it loves. They were always brothers to me, the Orientals of India and Persia, Egypt, Arabia, and Turkey. I would give much, indeed, to secure for them the happiness they deserve for what they have given to the culture and to the civilisation of the world. The stupidity of treating the Asiatic as an “inferior” I could never understand. It is no less impolitic than unjust. What a delight, in our century of semi-tones and of commercialism, to talk with men like Tagore! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER VII SMYRNA—GOD’S WORK—THE EXQUISITE SUNSET—MAN’S WORK—WAR I TAKE daily walks in Smyrna, with one of the Vali’s officers, chiefly among the ruins. The European part of the town (save for a few houses on the quay and a few hospitals, schools, and churches) has simply ceased to exist. The empty “shells” of what were once fine streets are a great danger to passers-by and must all be blasted.