And she thinks of Farid, and of what he must feel at the nearness of a companion over whose features ugliness is spreading... And is there anything more painful than that a beautiful woman should lose her charms, and become, after glorying in those charms, an ugly creature?? A helpless fury took hold of her; she fell to striking her face and letting out heartrending gasps — moans that verged on madness. These fits came back upon her again and again... but she refused to surrender to so calamitous a reality.. And the expression of her will not to fall into such surrender was that she began to hate Farid — Farid, whom this fate had not

struck: it had struck her; and what harm would such a disease have done him? — just as nothing in the logic of outward things required that she be the victim of this fate, neither she nor anyone else among men. Her hatred of Farid drove her also to despise him, and she took to provoking what were not the noblest inclinations in him: if she yielded to his insistence, and her mother's, to receive him, she would hasten to put on the most splendid of the attire she had prepared for her hours of intimacy, in which her body appears tempting and provocative; and she would jeer at Farid and mock his pity for her, when she possessed such allure and beauty

as would captivate any man. This state of mind overwhelmed Layla, and she came to hate all people — to hate her mother, to hate Farid, and to envy the maid, forever scrutinizing her clear skin. How many occasions she invented for this girl to enter her room, losing herself in contemplation of her clear face! And how she wished her portion of this life had been the portion of this servant girl — then she would not be living this heartbreaking tragedy, in which no fortune avails, no money serves, no rank profits... Layla's mother awoke, one still night among the stagnant nights of May, to sad, weeping strains rising from the drawing room. She moved with