like any other, with man's virtues and his failings. Yet your deeds in the years of girlhood are no less lofty than the deeds of your childhood. Fate, too, has its ambitions and desires — in tormenting you and denying you. How many harsh commands and unjust laws were handed down, now from your mother, now from your father, and again from the schoolmistress or the uncle on your father's side or the uncle on your mother's side or the elder brother or even the younger: sometimes you resisted, but every time you submitted. The law willed that you should not win people's favor unless you yielded and bowed and were broken! Yours, always, the defeat, and another's the victory.

And when your heart opened to love, and you loved my father — how many stumbling blocks and obstacles rose in your path: the neighbors all gossip, the relatives all gossip, and people all envy and jealousy. With criminal, black hands they hoed up those pictures of lily and jasmine which you painted from the inspiration of love, in its tenderness and its dominion.

At last you became a wife. You compelled your family — it was the first time and the last — to bow to your will and grant your request; and my father was handsome and rich, and money and beauty helped you to prevail. But quickly you woke from the heedless daze of enchanting love — that greatest of factories of flight and mirage and rainbow colors ... beautiful things the eye sees and the fingertips cannot touch. And there you were, a wife in an age when a man boasts to his fellows that his wife is docile, pliant, soft, skilled at keeping to her corner and refusing to be seen. For her the house is a spacious world; for him the world, wide as it is, is narrow and pale. My father was jealous and rough, and you were noble; your nature was gentleness, kindness, and forgiveness. How often did he turn away and you drew near, how often was he harsh and you were tender, how often did he curse and you blessed? How much misery did he give you, and how much happiness did you give him? You were an embodiment of goodness, a proof in flesh and blood that woman is an angel in the form of a human being!

And from a wife of these virtues and

qualities and traits, you became a mother, adding to those virtues and qualities and traits a virtue that surpasses them all together: motherhood. You were a brook and became a sea; you were earth