114 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

from the theatre, someone to be described in terms
of flowers and pink ribbons, chocolates and cham-
pagne in the slipper, of black silk stockings and
corsets. All the lights in Riga were dimmed by ten:
the public gardens were quite dark and full of
whispers, giggles from hidden seats, excited rustles
in the bushes. One had the sensation of a whole town
on the tiles. It was fascinating, it appealed immensely
to the historical imagination, but it certainly wasn't
something new, lovely and happy.

Even tie street women were period. They were
not, poor creatures, young enough to be brazen under
what little light there was, though they had a
depraved air of false youth as if they knew their
only hope was to appeal to the very old. Their
manners too, one felt, dated back to the Grand
Dukes. Their allure was concentrated in an ankle,
a garter, which they would bend down to adjust with
a dreadfully passe gesture of allurement. Their street
manners were infinitely more elegant than the street
manners of London, but they weren't in the picture
any longer. There were no more Grand Dukes on the
spree to be attracted by their immature girlish legs,
their corseted waists, their slipping garters, their
black silk stockings; unless perhaps one of the old
droshky drivers was a Grand Duke. It was not im-
probable. At Tallinn a Baron carried luggage at the
air-port. And there could be no more suitable ending
of an evening than for a street-walker to go home
with the droshky driver; the garter with the long
grey Franz Josef whiskers.

You couldn't really pity them. They belonged so
completely to a different world. A war and a revolu-