its path the green and the dry, the cheap and the precious alike... Why then does Mr. Freiha want woman to strip herself bare in her writing?... Is this the realist literature in his view, and within the bounds of his conceptions?!

If anything remains for us to take pride in, brother Freiha — we women of this sweeping generation — it is our natural preservation of woman's innate modesty, above all in her earliest acquaintance with life... whether we be Eastern or Western; oth-erwise there would exist no fem-ininity that men like you aspire to glorify, and that woman herself aspires to strengthen within her.

As for Mayy... yes, Mayy the genius, the warm of breath, Mayy who chafed at Gibran's mistiness despite her love for him and her devotion to him, out of her sincere (realism); Mayy into whose overflowing, pure well you cast your bucket without intent or design, as became clear to me, in order to speak your word about Mirdad even if you wished to make it a passing occasion — I do not think that anyone who has written about Mayy — and by God's praise they are many — shares this opinion of yours about her; and the greater likelihood is that you have not read a single line of what she wrote after the years of adolescence, the years of dreams flying upward toward idealism. For Mayy's literature will have immortality written for it — if there is any immortality for literature in an age that will race with the speed of deceptive lightning toward its ends — not because it is realistic or imagina-tive, nor because it is romantic or classical, but because it stamped with its imprint an epoch in the history of the literary renaissance at the beginning of this century. It was a powerful echo of a movement of transition out of the ages of stagnation, in whose blessed vanguard Mayy stood, as we see in most of her works, if not to say in all of them...

Then, do you truly want for the East a woman writer of the type of George Sand, to be immortal down the years?! George Sand was not libertine in that respect so much as she wanted to be free in all the aspects of life, and so much as she was faithful to her literature and loving of it. And that on the testimony of

(Alfred de Musset) himself, when he accused her of coldness and rigidity in one of his letters to her; and on the testimony of her sick musician, who wearied of her company after she had bound him to work daily within a fixed span of hours, and who soon found the fitting opportunity to flee. So the cause of her immortality was not