When the twentieth century reached its midpoint, "Salah" had lived forty years of his life, in the course of which his manhood had come to completion, his confidence in life had been shaken, and he had lost his faith in people. Yet three disappointments were, in his view, the most painful of the lessons he had received — with a fighter's patience and a thinker's stubbornness. Salah counts these disappointments off for me, saying:

— The first disappointment came some years ago, the day my family forced upon me marriage to... a girl I had not known before the week of the wedding... When I protested, they threatened to deprive me of my inheritance and of the paternal blessing, so I submitted. And I consoled myself, saying: "Marriage is fate's allotment! Perhaps this lot is one of God's gifts that come without glad tidings before them, as He deals with the saints and the holy ones!"

And it turned out that this girl who became my wife

gathered together, on top of her ignorance, everything else I detest in women.

He rests a little, to recover his composure and the clearness of his voice. Then he says:

— As for the second disappointment, it is daughter to the first, for it is a branch of that same stock — I was blessed with children in an abundance I had no need of. Especially in the grim days the world passed through before the Second World War, and the crises that followed it, which in our country were harsher than the crisis of the war itself — not to mention the catastrophes we now await, if it is true that the theater of war this time will be the Middle East itself, rather than an exhausted Europe, poor in oil!

And more galling still, my daughters came out exact copies of their mother — except for intelligence, which they inherited from me, no doubt!!

And Salah laughs at his own joke, making a show of lightening things for himself and for me, as he recounts his confessions to me like a brother I have loved since we were companions in boyhood and partners in youth. Then he continues:

— And the third disappointment is... in what every

human being can feel for himself, in the society created by the war... or rather by the successive wars our wretched generation has witnessed, from the Balkan War down to the last war. You will find among people no one faithful, and no faithfulness. Even the friend — whom we agreed to call by that beloved name — has become an ancient legend, now that self-interest has taken the place of every human feeling and every spiritual inclination!

With these words Salah closed his fortieth year; and the clock of "Big Ben" was striking twelve in "London" — we listened to it on the radio, and each of us set by its strokes the wristwatch that had accompanied him a full quarter of a century.

Then I rise and take leave of my friend, and he goes in alone to his bedchamber, where his wife lay surrendered to a deep sleep. The man casts upon her a glance into which he pours all the regrets in his soul. Then he advances with slow steps toward the

electric switch to put out the light, veiling from his eyes what wounds them, and casting the whole of the past into the darkness of oblivion. Had not the clock struck, announcing the coming of the first year of the new half-century?.. Why, then, should Salah not nourish in himself the dreams of the hoped-for tomorrow, instead of chewing over the pains of a vanished yesterday?...

And the man murmurs, as though listening to a voice rising from the depths of his own soul:

— The crime is your mother's and your father's crime, Salah! It was they who drove you into this marriage... True! But your bowing to tradition with-out reflection makes you an accomplice in that crime!

And the night passes without his tasting sleep. He had hoped to spend this night at a merry evening party arranged by certain acquaintances and friends. But his wife refused to accompany him to it, and forbade him to go alone — for the simple reason that one of the young ladies invited to that party admired Salah, and the wife had one day seen her smile at him an innocent smile.