her consecrated soul, a soul of its own particular stamp.
Then comes the fourth factor, late, but the most violently working of all the factors in her being. How quickly that sensitive soul turned from pessimism to foreboding, then to black melancholy, then to a wound to her confidence in herself — a deep wound that never healed. For there appeared in the world of letters the book Gibran Khalil Gibran by Mikhail Naimy: a book which the public read with one eye and May read with another.
That Gibran — who held in her imagination the sanctity of worship, and in her mind the station of the ideal artist, the man of the spotless soul and the noble, candid virtues — what had come over him, that his self should be pictured to her as other than what it had been molded upon?
A book in which its author told the tale of man weak before his unbridled instincts, leaving no glimpse or fragment of Gibran's inner secrets without expounding it fully, gracefully, captivatingly — save indeed for one matter he did not touch upon in his book, as he declared more than once, out of regard for her feelings and for the moral traditions that rule our Arab East, as he says, which make talk of such things a kind of scandal.
Was Naimy right, one wonders, in the view he took? Would it truly have pained May to be mentioned in connection with so exalted a form of love — so that she would be ashamed of it and hide from the scandal? No, I believe not. Had Naimy mentioned this noble love in his book, he would have given Gibran a single moral virtue interceding for all his faults in May's eyes; and he would have respected in it the sanctity of a heart, and spared the dignity of a woman.
And what a woman she was among women! Was she an ordinary woman? She was a woman of pride and disdain, of a standing no woman before her in history had attained, of a personality rising above all personalities to take the first place in the ideal.
Would it not have grieved her not to
be — she in her own person — that ray which lit Gibran's barren road until it brought him to the highroad of peace?
Thus it was among Naimy's crimes against Arabic literature that he deprived it of May's voice early. She fell silent, swallowing her griefs one after another without a word either way; and so the field of doubt was opened before her — doubt of people, kin and friends alike — until these and those said of her that she had been stricken in her mind; and the doctors said of her, “she is afflicted with paranoia”; and history
pronounced upon her its decisive word: — Early genius ends by driving its possessor to madness, for human capacity is limited — alas.
Has history, then, done May justice? Was its word about her true? And does science go along with it in this mistaken opinion?
History has not done May justice — but it will, when the time comes and someone appears to vindicate the proud writer's passive course toward her persecutors and those who laid snares for her.
“B.V.D.” flannel pajamas
The fortress that shields you from the biting cold of winter
PYJAMAS B.V.D.
Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.
Warmth. Elegance. Durability.