LIKE BANDITS

Shannon News, 29 June 1926, Page 3

LIKE BANDITS

REFUGEE BELLES AS LOVETHIEVES SHANGHAI, May 1. Vampire refugee women from Russia —many of them aristrocrats and princesses, but with no other fortune except their pretty faces and graceful figures—are scandalising British and American wives and sweethearts in Shanghai by making a dead sot at their men folk.

Scores of homes have been broken up; nus'oands have left their wives; engagements which have lasted years have been broken off —and all because of the pretcy smiles and wiles of the .refugees from the Steppes. So serious has the husband and sweetheart stealing become that a number of British and American women have banded themselves together in a sort of self-protection . society with the .object of keeping the Russians from poaching on their preserves.

When the fascinating refugees first came to Shanghai everybody —the wives and SSvcethearts included —received them with open arms. Sympathetic with their troubles, the British and American colony could not do enough for them. Everybody they went they were made welcome. And then the troubl e began. A husband would be found kissing a pretty refugee, at a dance; an.engaged man would begin to neglect his finance for an alluring exhibition dancer at a fashionable hotel. In a few months it had jecome serious. Almost every day brought news of some lresh scandal. An English judge in the Shanghai Settleinent Jourt recently made the statement that most of the divorces which have come before him during ,tlie past few months were almost entirely brought owing to- the fascination of the Russians.

The domes! ic storm has now oioken out in the Press, in a flood of indignant letters from British and American wives, attacking the m6rais >i the refugees and demanding their expulsion from China. .The fur vamps nave not been slow to take up the gags, and their side of the problem -S given in a letter to th Press: —

"I wish to defend my Russian . tfugoes sisters and to inforni other women that they are not afraid to call a spade a spade. -We Russians have not the‘flat chest, the flat teet, We are not the ‘good-fellow-how-much-you-got’ l iud. We do not take “that we Russians are proving so atand get so tired we can do nothing.” Another girl, who has married an English husband, writes that the rouble with Englishwomen is that mce they have married a man they •lo not exert themselves to keep his. .ovc. “Small wonder,” she says, that w Russian..! are providing so at;raclive when married Englishwomen i How themselves to become such rumps.

“Willi Russian women, love is •veryvhing, and we try and make it last by being always fascinating and interesting.”

What the Englishwomen thing of it all was told me by a prominent Shanghai hostess.' “It is the case of ne wolf in slicej’s clothing,” she declared.

“If it were an isolated case or two, Jne could understand it, but there is not the slightest doubt that a good many of them are deliberately laying hcmselves to catch a man ,and they don't care much whether he is married or not.

“They’ve got to live somehow, l uippose, and hardly any of them lias illy means. Their only’’hope is to get married. But to swoop down on our husbands like bandits is absolutely scandalous. Somehow or othet it must be stopped.”