Though he had never in his life seen Ayasha in anything but sensible calicos or the simple, ivory-colored tarlatan that had been her one good dress-the dress in which they had buried her last August-still the sight of the Arabian ladies tore at the unhealed flesh of his heart. From the waltz they slid into another Lancers, almost without break. Dimly, the sounds of quarreling could be heard when the curtain to the passageway was raised. The night was late enough for just about everybody to be drunk, both on that side of the passageway and this. Still he didn't look up, seeking such nepenthe as the music had to offer.

Maybe it was because Ayasha had laughed at the latest fad for things Arabic. "They think it's so glamorous, the life of the harim," she had said, that lean, hooknosed face profiled in the splendor of the cool Paris sun that poured through the windows of their parlor in the Rue de 1'Aube. Beadwork glittered in her brown hands.

"To do nothing except make yourself beautiful for a man... like your little placees. As if each of them assumes that she's the favorite of the harim, and not some lowly odalisque who spends most of her day polishing other women's toenails or washing other women's sheets. And the harim is of course always that of a wealthy man, who can afford sorbets and oils and silken trousers instead of cheap hand-me-downs that have to last you three years."

She shook her head, a Moroccan desert witch incompletely disguised as a French bonne femme. The huge black eyes laughed in a face that shouldn't have been beautiful but was. "Like dreaming about living in one of these castles up here, without having seen a castle, which look horribly uncomfortable to me. And of course, the dreamer is always the queen."

Ayasha had left Algiers at the age of fourteen with a French soldier rather than go into the harim her father had chosen for her. When January met her, even at eighteen she had risen from seamstress to designer with a very small-but spotlessly clean-shop of her own, and had little time for the romantic legends of the East.