Mrs. Edna Stur (wearing the dark glasses) in the midst of the tennis team of Beirut College for Women
Since woman has been, life has been!
And when she set down the final melody, the universe swayed with intoxication, and a string slipped from her lyre into the wilds of a distant land!
She sings her anthems as energy and vitality, lives them as a soaring of the spirit, and understands them as the very being of a people and a firm foundation for the advancement of a nation.
To her home my feet made their way, and my heart was all questioning. And in an atmosphere of intimacy and ease, Mrs. Edna Stur set out to unstring the past in crystallized beads, burnished by the embroidery of remembrance:
I was still in the down of the wing when I left my nest, Lebanon, for a land beyond the seas — for the United States, where I settled in St. Louis, in the state of Missouri, and entered a secondary school, from which I went on to an institute of physical education. Then I returned to Lebanon to stay a year and a half, and left it again for thirty-seven years! — As if a fleeting thought had crossed my interlocutor's mind, she fell silent a moment, then added: That long absence did not make me forget the country; the homeland and its people were in my soul and in my life; and my aunt, Anastas Khoury, kept kindling my desire and my longing to return. I can almost feel her ardor now, and glimpse the gleam in her eyes when she spoke of the homeland!
Days racing past like drifting clouds, and my life a circle that would not come to rest:
from work in the community to athletic training, until I married a young American and firmly resolved to settle down.
I lived in New York, with a magic thread drawing me to the shores of Lebanon!
— And in what field did you work during this period?
— And where should a woman work, where do horizons open before her, if she does not plunge into the thick of life in the educational or the social
The tennis team of Beirut College for Women, whose training Mrs. Stur supervises