At last, through this repulsive maze of vice, we arrive at the Russian restaurant where we are to meet Carayanni. Pera is now full of Russian restaurants, where a money-spending international crowd revels in so-called Bohemian life. Why not? The walls are artistically painted and the furniture queer looking enough. Of course, like most amateur Bohemians, the only thing which this international crowd has adopted from the Quartier Latin of Paris is free love. Anyhow, with the punctuality of a perfect host, Carayanni is waiting for us. Well groomed and prosperous-looking in his dapper London-made clothes, he is trying his best to look and act like an Englishman. His polite nonchalance and his general appearance are so perfect that, despite his dark complexion, it is hard for me to realize that this is the same man who, before I left Constantinople about ten years ago, was making only a very modest living in gambling and card games in which he always was an expert. He has changed his business, however, during the war and is now one of the most successful food speculators in town. Carayanni has a special table prepared right near the center of the room and on our way to the table he stops to greet the waitresses and to gracefully kiss their hands. Most of these girls are supposed to belong to the Russian nobility, so in Pera it has become the custom to kiss the hand that feeds you. We take our seats and glance about the room. As a whole the place is almost respectable. The crowd is the usual mixture seen now at night in Pera: mostly olive-skinned, thick-lipped, dissipated Armenians and Greeks who can afford high-priced restaurants, thanks to their unscrupulous war and post-war profiteering; many foreigners who can the better afford to spend in view of the low rate of exchange of the Turkish money; a few Americans who love to indulge in foreign countries in pleasures forbidden to them in their own either by puritanic traditions or by the eighteenth amendment. The food is excellent; we have a taste of “vodka,” the Russian drink, while at other tables imported and local wines of rare vintage are consumed copiously. The professional entertainment provided consists of an excellent gypsy orchestra, the best I have heard anywhere, a few singers who sing some weird Russian songs and an interpretative dancer who interprets better than she dances. In between the professional numbers those who desire to dance can do so in the middle of the room which remains cleared for the purpose. After all, it is the same kind of cabaret restaurant that one finds in London, Paris or New York, except that its performers are Russian, its waitresses are supposed to be princesses and its crowd is a little more “Bohemian.”