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Page:Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.djvu/420

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AMBASSADOR MORGENTHAU'S STORY

Belgrade forest. As I was losing no opportunities to influence him, I accepted this invitation. We autoed to Buyukdere, where four attendants with horses met us. In our ride through the beautiful forest, Enver became rather more communicative in his conversation than ever before. He spoke affectionately of his father and mother; when they were married, he said, his father had been sixteen and his mother only eleven, and he himself had been born when his mother was fifteen. In talking of his wife, the Imperial Princess, he disclosed a much softer side to his nature than I had hitherto seen. He spoke of the dignity with which she graced his home, regretted that Mohammedan ideas of propriety prohibited her from entering social life, but expressed a wish that she and Mrs. Morgenthau could meet. He was then furnishing a beautiful new palace on the Bosphorus; when this was finished, he said, the Princess would invite my wife to breakfast. Just then we were passing the house and grounds of Senator Abraham Pasha, a very rich Armenian. This man had been an intimate friend of the Sultan Abdul Aziz, and, since in Turkey a man inherits his father's friends as well as his property, the Crown Prince of Turkey, a son of Abdul Aziz, made weekly visits to this distinguished Senator. As we passed through the park, Enver noticed with disgust that woodmen were cutting down trees and stopped them. When I heard afterward that the Minister of War had bought this park, I understood one of the reasons for his anger. Since Abraham Pasha was an Armenian, this gave me an opportunity to open the subject again

I spoke to him of the terrible treatment from which the Armenian women were suffering.