Sylvia reached Odessa on October 28th, and the long front looking toward a leaden sea held a thought of England in its salt rain. The cabaret at which she was going to work was like all other cabarets, but, being situated in some gardens that opened on the sea, it had now a sad and wintry appearance of disuse. A few draggled shrubs, a few chairs not worth the trouble of putting into shelter, a deserted band-stand and open-air theater, served to forbid rather than invite gaiety. However, since the cabaret itself could be reached from a street behind the sea-front and visitors were not compelled to pass through the ghosts of a dead summer, this melancholy atmosphere was obviated. The _pension d'artistes_ at which Sylvia stayed was kept by a certain Madame Eliane, a woman of personality and charm, with a clear-cut, rosy face and snow-white hair, who limped slightly and supported herself upon two ebony canes. Madame Eliane objected to being called _Mère_, which would have been the usual prefix of ironical affection awarded to the owner of such a _pension_; although she must have been nearly sixty, she had an intense hatred of age and a remarkable faculty for remaining young without losing her dignity. For all the girls under her roof she felt a genuine affection that demanded nothing in return except the acceptance of herself as a contemporary, the first token of which was to call her Eliane; from the men she always exacted _Madame_. Her nationality was believed to have originally been Austrian, but she had become naturalized as a Russian many years before the war, when she was the mistress of an official who had endowed her with the _pension_ before he departed to a remote Baltic province and the respectability of marriage. Sylvia found that Eliane was regarded by all the girls as an illustration of the most perfect success to which any one of their profession might aspire. "She's lucky," said a small cockney called Ruby Arnold, who sang in English popular songs of four years ago that when Sylvia first heard them shocked her with their violent resuscitation of the past. "Yes, I reckon she's lucky," Ruby went on. "There isn't no one that doesn't respect her, as you might say. Isn't she cunning, too, to let her hair go white instead of keeping it gold like what it was once? Anybody can't help taking to anybody with white hair. I reckon with white hair and a house of my own I'd chuck up this life to-morrow, _I_ would. _N'est-ce pas que j'ai raison?_" she added, in French, with a more brutal disregard of pronunciation than Sylvia had ever heard. "_Oui, petite, tu as raison_," agreed Odette, a vast French blonde with brilliant, prominent eyes, those bulging myopic eyes that are generally the mirrors of vanity and hysteria. "I have a friend here," she continued in French, "_une femme du monde avec des idées très-larges_, who assured me that if she did not know what Eliane was, she might easily have mistaken her for a _femme du monde_ like herself."