Mrs. Margaret Nadim Dimashqiyah, wife of Lebanon's Minister Plenipotentiary in Egypt, is an English lady of distinguished stock who has made her forays in the world of writing and letters... She wrote this article for the magazine al-Musawwar a short time before the death of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Julia Dimashqiyah.

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Many women will not believe me, and I myself would not have believed such a story had it not happened to me, for nothing is harder on a lady than to love her mother-in-law.. and trust her.. and write about her.. We in Britain have a saying: "The best way to tame your mother-in-law.. is to have no mother-in-law at all" — for the mother-in-law problem is international, and there is nowhere in the world, in Britain or in Beirut, a mother-in-law who does not believe her dear son too dear and too precious for any girl to deserve him!

And my problem was more than any ordinary problem, for my mother-in-law was no ordinary mother-in-law, and my marriage was no ordinary marriage, because I am a stranger girl from the farthest West.. who snatched from an Eastern mother, from the heart of the East, her only, beloved son.. and so my heart would melt within my ribs whenever I thought of my mother-in-law!

A Love That Overcomes Obstacles

The story was strange and wondrous from its very beginning. My husband came to London with the first Lebanese diplomatic mission to Britain after Lebanon's independence, carrying a letter of introduction from a British diplomat in Beirut to his fiancée at Oxford. The fiancée was my intimate friend, and so it was not long before the fiancé's friend became the friend's fiancé..

Ever since my childhood I had felt that something in my soul drew me toward the East and away from the West; I felt that the warmth of the East, its humanity, its ardor, stirred something deep within me. So at Oxford and in London I mixed more with the foreign Eastern students.. My

schoolfellows wondered how I came so quickly to an understanding with these "strangers," but I found in their Eastern nature — frank, merry, deep — something more beautiful than the coldness of the West, its rigidity, and its utilitarianism..

And when I met "Nadim," he embodied all these virtues for me, for he overflowed with frankness, vitality, and tenderness.. And he was not — and I do not think he will ever be — the diplomat who means "no" when he says "yes."

A Lady of Personality

But one thing there was that troubled me, and that was his talk of his mother. His mother was everything in his life, and he spoke of her with enthusiasm, love, and admiration on every occasion.. From him I learned that his mother had been the first Christian woman to marry a Muslim in Lebanon, and that her marriage stirred an uproar at first, but before long became one of the most successful of marriages, and became