fact, everything we want.. Throw that filthy paper from your hand.. fling it far away from you, to the ground. And I ask you once again: by what road did it reach you? Are you in touch with him in secret! This angers me.. it angers me and rouses me.. Do you want people to say of us — of our house — what would shame us and pain us all?

— No, Father, I want nothing of the kind.. This paper reached me by a good road — by way of my brother: he gave it to me so that I might read in it a tempting notion. It speaks in plain, expressive words of the life of a man wallowing in happiness and luxury, as you all claim:

— Ah.. very fine. Then it is the picture of Mr. Fouad, the new suitor — is it not?

— Naturally you would know it. Yes, sir, it is exactly that: the picture of Mr. Fouad, whom you would have me take against my will merely because he is rich and moneyed — and because in his house there is plenty of bread — though it is he who turns and turns like a whirligig laden with sins, he who walks right and left like a man poisoned. Yes, it is exactly he, sir; and my brother gave it to me, not so that I should see him in this picture amid a degraded company of women — my brother's purpose in it was to stir me and whet my interest in him, and to make me understand that he is loved and sought after.. God forgive my brother: he missed the mark and failed of the target. Rather he drove every man far from my picture of things, from my thought and my feeling, and made my heart love, and drew near to my spirit and my soul, the person of my cousin, who has been afflicted with my love since long ago. I say afflicted with my love,

because his love for me has been an affliction that weighed heavily upon him: for my sake he has suf-fered at your hands, and tasted the two bitter things. And in spite of all that, no fair one has felled him but a single one — and she is I.. I alone, and no other woman. So here is the picture of Mr. Fouad in the midst of this company of naked women, as though they were sellers of forbidden love..

And now.. yes, now I throw this filthy paper from my hand, and fling it far away from me, to the ground.. And by this you should mark the vast difference between my cousin and these heaps of poisoned, forbidden bread.