Our next-door neighbour was a beautiful Greek girl, a veritable Helen, for the sake of whose beauty one might give up all things.  Young, elegant, serpentine; clad in a single garment, a light cinnamon gown clasped at the waist; no stockings, her legs bare and brown; on her head a Persian scarf embroidered with red and gold tinsel; her face white, with a delicate pink flush over it; hair and eyes black as night, but also with a glitter of stars.  Wherever she walked she was a picture, and whether she was working about the house, or idling with a cigarette on the verandah, or running over the sand to spank mischievous boys who had been trespassing, she was delicately graceful, something to watch and to remember.  I shall remember her chiefly in the setting of the night when the moon cast her lemon-coloured beams over the sea.

“Very beautiful and very young,” said my hostess, “but already she has a history.  She is only eighteen, but is married and has run away from her husband.  She wanted to marry a Russian, but her family forced her to take for husband a Greek, an old man, and so jealous and so frightened of the effect of her beauty upon other men that he shut her up and made her wear a veil like a Turk.  He would not let her out by herself, and he never brought any friends home; he took to beating her, and then she ran away.  Her father received her and promised to protect her.  The old Greek cannot get at her any more; he has given her up and gone away.”

“Good for her!” I hazarded.

“Not at all good,” was the answer.  “She has a husband and yet has none.  She is young, but she can’t marry again because she has a husband already.”

* * * * *

At Ghilendzhik all meals were served on the verandah, and one lived constantly in touch with the varying moods of the sea.

My hostess was a talker, ready to sit to any hour of the night chatting of her life and of Russia.  It was very pleasant to listen to her.  We sat together on the balcony after tea, with a big plate of grapes between us, and I heard all that the world had to say at Ghilendzhik.

A burning topic was the ruin that the sea had made of the verandah wall.  “The sea has been gradually gaining on us,” said my friend.  “When we came here, the village Council reckoned on that.  They smiled when we bought the house, for they held that in quite a short time it would be washed away.  The Council wishes to build a fine esplanade all along the sea-front—­our house stands in the way and they don’t wish to buy us out.  ‘You’d better buy the datcha,’ said Alexander Fed’otch to them.  ‘Oh no,’ said they, ’we leave that to God’—­by ‘God’ meaning the sea.  They bound us under a contract not to build anything in front of the house:  they said they did not wish the view to be obstructed, but in reality they did not want us to put up any protection against the waves.  They left the rest to Providence.  The result was that the whole property was nearly washed away in a storm.