...Do not say that the domineering red of the anemones is alone in adorning the fields of our society... Have you forgotten the violet?

Ever since I began to see, to weigh, and to make a practice of diving into the depths — all the depths — I have gone searching for the violet... and I have come to love the violet, and to find her sweet and great...

The violet was never weak, not for a single day! But by her silent skill she knew how to make beautiful the meaning of humility, until it became a throne for pride, and a refuge for greatness, however many its forms and colors and degrees...

I have known Mrs. Almas al-Duwayk for a long time... and the tie of kinship between us had the first hand in making her known to me... Often I would meet her here and there, and I would greet her and she would greet me; then I would ask after her condition or her health, and she would answer me briefly, with a passing smile that served as the musk-seal of the talk between us — and what talk!

I had never listened to her converse, nor visited her a single time, but I would feel in her glances a fineness

She points out to Miss Nur Salman an oil painting from her own brush

of sensibility and a graciousness in listening... and that was enough for me to say of her, between me and myself, that she is no ordinary human being...

The days went by, and there I was, finding myself with an appointment with chance — I, for whom chance has kept the truest and best of appointments...

...I had to accompany my mother on one of her "rounds" — so-and-so has been ill these two days... and so-and-so (poor so-and-so!) is reproachful and cross, and has sworn she will not set foot across our threshold unless we drink a cup of coffee with her at one of her "morning gatherings" — I had to accompany my mother here and there... Am I not a young girl — and praise be to God! And on the way home we turned in at Mrs. Almas's, and she was alone in the house, tidying it and adorning it and setting it in order...

I do not know how the talk began between us this time, but it soon took its natural course, from the future to the present to the past... that long yesterday — or say rather, that strange world standing by itself.

Our lady lived the life of the past for many years — that is, in the days when a girl reposed, surrendered, in the arms of those traditions... Like all women she wore the veil over her face; it was an inseparable part of a woman's personality in those days. The first affront the bride Almas suffered from her husband was that he asked her, with every tact and courtesy, to remove the veil so that she might be at ease; she refused with pride and disdain, and clung to the curtain over her face until the days themselves stripped it away, a short time later.

Her fluency of speech falls in no way short of her eloquence of pen; I have known in her a sincere frankness and a lofty spirit of rebellion.

From behind the veil Mrs. Almas studied and pursued learning until she gained the certificate... and a heroine indeed was she who held a

At her desk, setting down some of her reflections