— Listen, qarqour! Aren’t you weary of the endless good wishes of these dull people — “the joy of a bridegroom!” — which they fling at you wherever they meet you, in every circumstance and whatever the subject of the talk? I have begun to recoil from them, until I have come to hate the com-pany of people because of them!

She put this question to her husband certain that he would answer that he hated those wishes as she did or even more, and that he bore them because he had no authority over others to bridle their tongues. How great, then, was her astonishment when she heard his answer:

— Shall we revile people, qar-qoura, for wishing us happiness?

That answer assured Jamileh that pursuing the talk in this vein might disclose to her the secret of the first contradiction of thoughts and beliefs between her and Aziz.

Until that minute she had trusted with all her being that her life with Aziz would endure, as it had been until that night, a perpetual spring untroubled by the least difference of inclinations, tastes, opinions, or beliefs. So she feared to find even one small point on which her taste did not agree with her husband’s.

When Aziz had been about to buy her jewelry in Beirut, she had refused with all her might, because — as she said then — she did not want to be “a she-donkey hung with gold,” and because she counted adornment with gold and diamonds a disgrace to a woman who had in her beauty, her dis-position, and her husband’s love ornament enough for a lifetime. But Aziz insisted on his resolve and silenced her by saying that her argument was “the argument of the poor,” that it was better to dress for every occasion in its

proper dress, and that her station in society made it incumbent on her to wear ornaments of gold and diamonds. She yielded to his will, not because the force of his proof convinced her, but because she had settled it in her mind that the happiness of a married pair demands complete agreement in tastes, and for the sake of that happiness she subjected her taste to her husband’s. That is why she feared to pursue the talk, dreading to arrive where she did not wish to go. But her woman’s nature — that same nature which led her grandmother Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit — now drove her to pursue the talk she had opened without supposing it to be of any importance:

— Are we not happy without a “bridegroom”? Is our happiness incomplete without children?

She said this with the tip of her husband’s mustache still between