that leaping libertinism — as her critics of that day said of her, and as you too seem to have imagined — but her devotion to literature with such endurance and such love. Would that Mr. Freiha had counseled the women writers to be devoted to their literature without boredom or slackness; then he would have found himself absolved of his reckless, wandering counsels, and he would not have poured over his young lady this gushing torrent of commandments stamped with the name of the wandering journalist...
(— Why do you not offer people a picture of your life... of your feeling of deprivation, you the aware, cultivated young woman?
— Why do you not describe your feeling as you watch your brother live in an atmosphere of freedom, while you live a deprived captive, squandering your youth waiting for the knight of dreams to come himself and knock at the door?
— Why do you not blaze the trail before the daughters of your sex toward true literature!
— Why? And why? And why?)
And do these questions apply to your heroine, who is still under twenty-two? Is there any feeling of deprivation, when she fills eyes and ears and hearts, in the age of the rose and in the like of its radiance?
A young woman, my dear sir, at such an age stands at the utmost bounds of vitality, and vitality is an overpowering force; and this force may beget vanity and pride, or may cast into the depths of its possessor disdain and self-esteem — and in either case these stand
as an impregnable dam against sinking low or yielding. There are other worlds she can cross, and many goals she can reach — among them this very one that Mr. Freiha wishes for, only not upon this disgraceful plane.
And do you truly want the girl to live as if in an atmosphere of abandon, so as not to squander her leafy youth waiting for the knight of dreams to knock at the door himself and say to her: here I am, I have had my fill, and I want to marry?
Is this how you want women for your East!
Is this how you want for it women writers with a mission in life!
Do you truly think the nation will reap fruit from such a literature — and what forbidden fruit that would be, my dear sir!
[O God: here the man has begun to offer, after all these successive ages, his tempting apple...
And as the apple was the beginning of human life, so shall the apple be the end of this life.]
Woman, then, will have departed from her feminine nature and become the equal of man without his knowing it or her knowing it; and then life will halt from the law of contention, since we would all become men — but men unfaithful to the truth of life...
And thus the cycle of time will stop, and with it will stop the part of men and women of letters in true production, because human life by then will have withered away, or be on the road to withering.
Is this raving, O preacher with the quiver?
I do not think the psychologists will endorse you in uttering that word, should you wish to defend your foolish theory with it, for they will place you, without the least mercy, on the list of those who strew the road with roses before sexual deviance.
He Can't Swim!!
• Two criminals were sentenced to death by hanging, and the public was invited to watch the execution as a warning... The gallows was set up on a bridge over the river. When the executioner pulled the platform from under the first criminal's feet and his body swung in the air, it happened that the rope snapped, hurling the criminal into the river, where he swam far off and escaped death.
Then came the second criminal's turn. Standing at the executioner's side, watching him tie and secure the second rope, he said:
— Tie it well, very well... because I can't swim!!
• • •
• An American lady came to settle in Lebanon and began at once to learn Arabic — the language of the country. One day she asked her Lebanese assistant to find her a maid, and the next morning a girl came in whom the lady understood to be the expected servant. The following dialogue took place between them:
The lady: What's your name?!
The girl: — My name is Mas-ou-deh..
The lady: — No. That's not nice. I am 'Miss.' You are just ''Oudeh'!!