Dr. Christie knows how to handle women to perfection. We are a small circle, and he says that wives must share in the faculty meetings. He declares that he wants our opinion and our advice, and that "the very best example set to the Orientals is to show them how we respect and defer to our women." But I know this is only half the truth. He takes us in, so that we won't be able to criticize decisions in which we had no part. I knit in faculty meetings. My college education never destroyed the woman's instinct to have hands constantly occupied. Only, I sometimes forget and go ahead at my knitting mechanically. The first baby-band I made in faculty meeting was big enough to go around Herbert. So I called it a cholera belt and gave it to him. Orientals love to talk and talk and talk and talk. So do Occidentals. And in faculty meetings I have discovered that men are not a bit less garrulous than women. Since I committed matrimony I've found to my surprise that the other sex has very much the same failings as mine. This comes out in faculty meetings. I bet I'd find the same thing in corporation board meetings. Every one loves to talk, listens impatiently to others when they talk, watches for an opportunity to get another word, and gives in through weariness or indifference rather than through conviction. The best talker has it over the best thinker every time. _Mersina, January eighteenth._ I have written you about the Doughty-Wylies, how they stopped for lunch with us in Tarsus on their way from Konia, the summer British Consulate, to the winter Consulate at Mersina, and what joy it was for us to meet them. A few days later, a letter came with the inscription "For the Youngest Bride at St. Paul's College." It was a week-end invitation for Herbert and me. We went down to Mersina the very next Saturday. That was in October. Since then, week-ends with the Doughty-Wylies have been in a certain sense oases--you understand what I mean. The British Consulate means that world of ours which seems far away, and is missed occasionally in spite of the novelty of Tarsus life and the cordiality of the missionaries. At the Dougthy-Wylies, I am able to dress in the evening, and Herbert always looks best to me in his dinner-coat. We are unconventional until we get back into convention: then we wonder how and why we ever broke loose. With tea served when you wake up, ten o'clock help-yourself-when-you-want breakfasts, a morning canter, siesta after lunch, and whiskey-and-soda and smokes in the evening--we are thirty miles only from Tarsus, and yet three thousand. We are back in an English country home. We can smell the box and feel the cold and fear the rain--so strong is the influence of the interior--until we step out-of-doors into the sunshine that makes us thankful, after all, that "back in England" was only a dream.