"She was born a Mdivani and she has their ruthless charm. A genuine exotic­-half savage, half sophisticated, her strange and elusive personality tamps everything she owns. Even her hot-water bottle has a black velvet cover. She has the reticent, elongated sort of body that you see in the paintings of El Greco Greco, and her simple black gowns, always by Chanel, accentuate it divinely. She wears evening slippers as perishable as the most gossamer stockings-satin sheaths without heels or leather soles, they fit her long slim feet like gloves, and are made to her special design by a bootmaker in Paris whose name she refuses to reveal. She walks in them with her own heels slightly lifted from the ground, as in dancing; it is the way they taught her to walk at the Turkish academy in Constantinople, where she went to school...."