Yes — defiance is not easy, and leaps do not come thus, with-out preliminaries... development moves quietly... but it can be felt.

And I fell to thinking over her words as I gazed at the splendid Oriental ornament hanging from the ceiling.

Then we went back to sleep at Suad's, in the hope of meeting the members of the welfare association at their dispensary the next morning. And we kept the appointment at nine sharp...

In the courtyard of the place were women and children, sallow and gaunt, their eyes peering out of sockets ringed with black, waiting for the doctor...

Inside were the clinic and the administration room.

We saw the president and the members dressed in white, and the president, Mrs. Wadi'a, volun-teered to show me the registers and the personal-record book of every patient.

Everything orderly, arranged, clear, set out in figures. The reports say that the dispensary's doctor has examined, in the last ten months, 10,776 patients... As for the diseases, I shall not enumerate them, for they are too many to confine within a reportage... but half of them are caused by malnutrition.

They were poor, and it is not their fault that they are poor, just as it is not their fault, either, that their parents do not believe in limiting births...

A single family brings forth ten

children, or a dozen... and suste-nance is upon God... and upon the charitable associations...

The doctor examines the patients, and when he has diagnosed the illness the association buys the medicine and supplies the family with milk — and it goes on supplying it with milk daily for a year or more...

And stranger than this: in summer the distribution is made twice, lest the milk spoil, the mothers being too ignorant to guard it from spoiling.

The members of the association make the rounds of the houses, guiding the mothers toward cleanliness, teaching them how to wash their children's bodies, and instructing them in the virtue of sweeping the floor...

I must have shown that I thought the task too great, for I looked up at the president and she said, "I feel what is passing through your mind... To feed and treat thou-sands of the sick is something no association, or associations, could manage... But what cannot be attained in full is not to be abandoned in the main..." And I felt in her tone a sincerity that does not belong to those who dally with works of charity...

I looked into the doctor's room, and it was equipped with every-thing the clinics need...

The mothers were standing in a line, each carrying a child on her arms, with one in her belly and three at her side.

Besides the doctor, the center has two nurses who assist him... and

the members of the association take part in the service, two at a time, by rotation...

I looked at the faces around me — good faces that wished they could do something of worth; in their eyes was an admission that every poor quarter in the city needs a dispensary and an association.

But the problem is a problem of money... before everything else... and at this obstacle dreams clip their own wings...

And so the visit to the dispensary ended, and two hours later I found myself getting into a car, with Angele beside me, camera and all... thinking of the city whose women, still veiled, drop their votes into the ballot boxes and busy themselves with works of charity...

Cristalline

Good sweets

are prepared with the vegetable shortening

Cristalline

CRISTALLINE

The pure vegetable shortening

Guaranteed 100%

Cristalline