This public association of Turkish ladies and men was an innovation to me. It had gradually come to pass during my ten years absence. Before my departure Turkish ladies could only be seen by friends of the family, and then exclusively in the strict privacy of their homes. They went out by themselves. They never mingled with men in public places. They did not even talk to them if they met casually on the streets. They would only bow slightly or make a discrete “temenah”--the graceful Turkish salutation which consists in lifting the hand towards the lips and to the forehead. Now, ten years later, Turkish men and women were talking and sitting together in public places and in clubs, freely associating with each other. This was surely a concrete sign of, at least, social progress. I renewed many old friendships that night at the club, and my wife began there many acquaintances which developed later most cordially. My wife was surprised to meet many foreign girls who had, like herself, married Turks. When we announced our engagement several of her friends in America had endeavoured to dissuade her from marrying a Turk. Surely a Turk could not make a good husband, East and West could never mix and anyhow why should she be the first foreigner to marry a Turk? She had of course set aside all these arguments and had believed me when I told her that many Turks had married foreigners and lived happily ever after. I don't think, however, that she ever conceived that foreign marriages had been so usual. That evening at the club and during our subsequent stay in Constantinople, she found herself in a most international _milieu_, although associating exclusively with Turkish families. She met in Prinkipo a charming Austrian girl, who had married an admiral of the Turkish navy. The mother of one of my childhood friends is a Russian lady, while the wife of another is a most attractive Bavarian girl. Many are the Turks who studied in France and married French girls. But the first prize for international marriages goes unquestionably to the family of Reshid Pasha where four out of seven members married foreign girls? Italian, English and American. So, after all, my wife found out that not only she was not the first foreign girl, but she was not even the first American girl who had married a Turk and she hastened to write it to her friends in America and to tell them that from what she could see and by her own experience East and West could and did mix. The Moslem religion and the Turkish customs allow complete latitude as far as marrying foreign girls is concerned and leave them of course absolutely free to practise their own religion. As for the Turks making good husbands, I believe of course that this is entirely dependent on the individual and not on the race. There are good and bad husbands among the Turks, just as there are good and bad husbands among other nations.