a little, they would have grasped what contempt that holds for all their powers—even for woman-hood itself.”

And this desolation may make her feel that there is no spring in life, and that nature is empty of all that is splendid and beautiful:

“Evening drew near, and spring stirred me, and I wished to go out and wander, to share with nature in its joys. It was as if I imagined the walls of the house cutting the tie between me and it, making me feel deprived of communion with the created things calling out with the fragrance of May among the branches, and with the adornment of the bride-earth.” What, then, can this deprivation be to which she points here?

And there is a subject May chose for herself on the pretext of linguistic reform and social guidance, though in truth I do not fancy she chose it except because it occupied her broodings in the hours of her solitude with her own heart—namely, the subject of “So-and-So and His Madame,” where she says: “Among the set phrases used on New Year's greeting cards we find this very widespread one—So-and-so and his madame offer you their congratulations.” And she comments: “How often my eye has fallen on these words. And though I am used to them, they make me laugh every time, for they remind me of that Lebanese who lost his wife in the streets of New York and went about asking the police after her in a tongue he claimed was English, when he said: Ya mister, where has that misteera gone?” Then she comes to her criticism, asking: “If he mentions her in her absence, I wonder how he calls her? Does he say my lady, that is, ‘my madame,’ as this word means in French?”

Thus we sense in the style of this artist among writers a tender feminine breath exhaling love and mercy and compassion from behind the lines—but they are bitter exhalations, whose source

is the deprivation that condemned her to live far from the atmosphere of the motherhood for which she was created: that sweet instinct which accompanies woman from the moment she opens her eyes to the light until her last days—from her time as a little girl hugging her beloved doll to her breast, to the day the grave hugs her to its own. Yes, God created her to be a tender mother, guiding her children by the light of what she had gained in learning and acquired in experience. And this motherhood of hers would not have kept her from carrying out the literary and idealistic mission to which she devoted her life and her pen.

And you will no doubt perceive that I have mentioned such things only to prove to you May's devotion to her literature and, in consequence, to her society. For

the true writer is he who dips his pen in the ink of his spirit to render what his heart, believing in life, inspires. And what is life but this pure, devoted love? Nor do I think she would have accepted a man as husband merely for his looks or his money; rather she dreamed of a marriage arising between spirit and spirit, and between heart and heart. And “when souls are great, bodies grow weary in pursuit of their desires,” as al-Mutanabbi says. And what is May, in truth, but a generous, great soul, and a delicate, sensitive heart? She is a woman of letters and a poet, and a virgin mother who embraced her children as symbols and phantoms.

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