— I know you don't smoke — so why

do you go to the café, where the idlers sit smoking!

— The café is a club... in its origin, and there are persons I cannot meet except at the café. So I go to see them... I am a social man, and my very work obliges me to keep in touch with people.

— You go to feast your eyes... on the dancing-girls and the artistes!

— And what harm is there in that?

And here a new storm begins, declared by the jealous wife, and it does not die down until Salah says jokingly:

— To me you are sweeter... than the artistes — what have I to do with them?! You are a rich, hot dish... and they are insipid, cold fare....

And then the wife softens — she who resembles her mother, Indian in origin, in her vehemence, espe-cially whenever jealousy blazes up within her, so that she foams and froths like... a military commander, or a police chief new to his post.

Perhaps it was the fatherly affection of which the wife had been deprived, because of the entrenched hatred between her mother and her father; and the mother's tenderness she never enjoyed, because of the weakness of that mother, who was in truth a "head servant," not a wife and mistress of a house...

And then the deprivation and repression that surrounded her childhood — all of this stamped the girl with a peculiar stamp, and robbed her of the elements of the feminine personality: graciousness, delicacy, modesty, and gentleness...

And Salah strikes his forehead with the flat of his palm, muttering between his teeth:

— Ah, would that I had died before this!

But then he catches himself, with the optimism of a man who does not resign himself to the fates nor bow to their contrariness, and says:

— If in all these years I have failed to reform my wife, then the least I can do is to work toward winning for woman... her rights, so that my daughter may live tomorrow a life better than her mother's!

And new horizons open before Salah whenever he thinks of these rights, which some men still begrudge woman. If they were wise, they would see that their own interest requires granting them, before there comes a time when they will be forced to surrender rights of their own.

And Salah says to his comrades, who share his view but favor waiting until woman's readiness to receive those rights is complete:

— The question is not a question of rights, and of perfecting the readiness to exercise them... The question is... bringing woman to feel responsibility. Yes, my broth-ers... woman must feel her respon-sibility as a human being, as a mother, and as a wife; and then the petty things will vanish which women usually cling to, to the ruin of men's lives... for their person-alities will then be complete, and they will not attach themselves to husks and paints, nor will fashions enslave them, nor counterfeit sentiments lead them astray!

And Salah glances right and left as he speaks on the subject, as though inspecting the place to make sure it is empty of... his wife, whom he pictures as one of the millions of Eastern women who, on the whole, are fit to be neither wives nor mothers. They are prolific bearers of children — a thing which does not suffice, by

itself, to set the Eastern society of tomorrow, in the second half of the twentieth century, upon sound foundations.

- 4 -

And on one of the nights of this past winter, in late January — through which the warmth of autumn lingered on, until one might have taken it for the warmth of spring — Salah's wife said to him:

— Tomorrow I am not prepared to cook for you. So arrange for your lunch at the restaurant!

— And you — won't you eat?

— No!

— And the children?

— They will eat dry scraps from what is on hand in the house!!

And the man wondered at this new step taken by his wife, who had grown up in a milieu that concedes to the husband superiority and precedence. But it only strengthened his belief that... a "psychological crisis" comes over his wife at the beginning of every month, or at its close; and that the thinness of her education, and the inferiority complexes within her, prevent that control of the nerves which is incumbent upon every civilized person — so that she breaks loose upon those around her with evils she creates out of nothing! And Salah says to me, closing his confessions:

— Woman... will not be set right until women enjoy their legitimate rights... those rights whose exer-cise will raise them to the level of men, who exercise rights and feel the responsibilities that follow. And there is no way but this road to salvation!!