had been degraded in this painful fashion and her precious reputation exposed to gossip — she whose opinion of mankind had been all goodness.

All this, together with my intense love for her and my admiration for her genius above any contem-porary writer, helped me take a vow upon myself that I would be the one to defend Mayy with a true defense.

And I did in fact begin writing about her life as a fevered man writes when he is near his last breath, that I might feel rest and reassurance; and from so much studying her and rereading her books and letters I would see her in my dreams. But at that very time I was pregnant and on the verge of giving birth, and no sooner did the delivery come than I closed my beloved manuscript, as though I closed with it the file of a death sentence upon an innocent person. Yes, I closed my book with no early return, and plunged up to my ears in the affairs of motherhood and in other affairs of branching paths and twisted aims, over which I shall forever lie sleeping, because they allow me no opportunity to write, not even for the space of half an hour in any day... etc."

This is Jihan in one of her letters: a passion carried to the point of headlong ardor; the dream of her life was to restore the shaken pic-ture to its proper frame. And she feared the days would not grant her time to come before the world of letters with her work on Mayy.

She used to say that she was ill... and when she visited me I preferred to avoid speaking with her of illness, for I never imagined that a human being in whom all these feelings still stirred

could die in a span shorter than a beautiful dream.

But she herself reflected this

foreboding often. Once she wrote to me: "Two important matters worked to delay my reply to you: the first is private, and the second I refer to the philosophy of fate, in its ebb and flow in our lives.

I did not mean by this preamble to apologize to you, for my quiver holds many true excuses: I am a mother, a schoolteacher, and a housewife of the obsessive type, with a wasted, highly sen-

sitive body of intractable temper, requiring constant rest and rest of mind and continuous feeding by means of vitamins and calcium and proteins and... and... a body of which the doctors say that it burns everything with amazing speed, until they fear it will soon burn itself up."

Poor thing — as if she were counting out her own days... I remember too that she wrote to

Norge

She washed, she wrung, she dried — and every weariness of mine she lightened!

Buy a Norge

It washes more...

cleaner and faster

The Lebanese Oriental Commercial Company

Bechara El-Khoury Street. Telephone 25450

NAPCO