... After a long absence, Miss Samira Azzam returns to publishing her stories in The Woman's Voice.

And as we welcome her return with the warmest of welcomes, we count Miss Azzam in the front rank of those who have served the Arabic story and helped to revive it, pulsing with life, keeping pace with the spirit of the age.

The conduct of Tommy Simmons with his wife was the wonder of the whole quarter, and of the women above all; for Simmons was more obedient to his wife than her own fingertips, and weaker before her than a small child, and the women of the quarter had known nothing from their men but harshness of treatment and excess of domineering.

This Mrs. Simmons, before she made the acquain-tance of Tommy Simmons — an acquaintance that ended in marriage — had been the widow of a man called Bob Ford. Ford had once gone to sea in a ship which the storms toyed with and sank, and the news reached Mrs. Ford of her husband's death; so she refrained from marrying for years, until the fates threw poor Simmons in her path, and she knew how to make of him a husband docile and meek as a lamb, whose character knew no road to rebellion, and who could do nothing but submit to the wishes of his dictator wife without condition or restriction.

Among the manifestations of this submission: he hands her his wages entire at the end of every week, and keeps for himself only what his wife allows.

She succeeded in getting him to give up smoking, on the plea that it harmed his precious health — though had she been fair she would have said that the harm was to the pocket, not to the health. What is more, by her firmness she was able to make of him a helper who tends with her to the affairs of the house whenever leisure allows him — washing the floor-tiles and the doors every Saturday evening, cleaning the tea things and setting them in order, and carrying the parcels whenever she goes out to buy something from the market.

Mrs. Simmons is a woman who worships cleanliness: it is a fourth impossibility that she should allow her husband to cross the threshold of the door in his shoes; rather he must take them off at the top of

the stairs and then enter the house to put on a house slipper.

There remained the matter of the husband's clothes, and these too fell within her sphere of authority. He must wear everything she buys him, according to her inclination and her taste and the measure her hand permits; for she knows better how to buy and is abler at bargaining. Would that she had stopped there — but she came out with a new innovation when it caught her eye one day that he needed new trousers. She said that she would stop buying ready-made clothes, it having become clear to her that the sellers were nothing but a band who held it lawful to cheat people and extort their money; and she resolved from that day to sew his trousers for him herself. And Mrs. Simmons was never lazy in carrying out whatever projects her genius mind hatched: she surprised her husband the following week by handing him something resembling a sack and ordering him to put it on as trousers.

There is no doubt the trousers came out looking comical on the husband's body, and when Tommy contemplated himself before the mirror and saw his body in this strange attire he was on the verge of weeping; but a single look from Anna restored his senses, so he swallowed his spittle and kept silent.

And would that this had been the last of the innovations! A few days later she issued him a new administrative order decreeing that she herself would undertake the cutting of the hair of his head, since she was skilled at such work, and there was no need for him to lavish his bounties on the barber — she had more right to the money than he. Nor did the woman lack speed of execution: quickly he emerged from between her hands with his head very like the body of a sheep overtaken by the shearing. And he did not dare open his mouth with one word of objection. Had he done so, he would have heard from her a phonograph record whose gist was that she wears herself out for his sake, tends his house and cooks his food and sews his clothes and saves him every penny — and is this ingratitude to be her reward from him? Yes, he knew beforehand what she would say, and so by silence he spared himself the hearing of this oration.