Through the Eye of the Needle

Every time he drew a breath and puffed out the smoke he had swallowed from his narghile — which rarely leaves him by day and through most hours of the night — he burst out at me, saying: Woman's political rights! Her equality with men! What a strange and wondrous heresy in the closing years of the twentieth century... And what does woman want beyond a husband, a shelter, and their derivatives?

And without leaving me room to ask a question, or to answer one, he said to me, smiling the smile of the victor — my silence may well have deluded him: My son, woman was created for the home alone, and world society will never find in her a better use than the bearing of sons and the preservation of the human constitution, which admits of no alteration or change.

As for me, his opinions did not astonish me — there are many like him whom life has brought to a halt at a certain point. And I excused him, too, for several reasons — among them that he has known nothing of the world but the narghile, and has tasted nothing but the swallowing of smoke.