A Picture Every Month – Who Worked the Miracle?

My friend is a writer... I have known her to be eccentric in her ways, in her life and in her talk; she was far from me, from society, and from the reality of life. Her gaze was forever soaring among the clouds, as though she were watching for some event in the distance, and her thoughts hardly ever settled on the ground or touched the soil. She was perpetually silent, and when she did open her mouth she hurled out the lava of a revolt blazing within her; and her revolt reached its peak when she spoke of men.

My friend had formed a very strange idea of the other sex: all of them, by her reckoning, are selfish; they love woman as a chattel they possess, or as a doll they strip of her thought and her soul so as to imprison her body in their golden cages — and woe to her thoughts if they should try to smash those cages.

And my friend refused to change this opinion of hers, and refused to stand in the ranks of the "bondwomen," as it pleased her to call married women.

And yesterday the miracle happened... My friend's face lit up; it was radiant, and she herself was light and merry, and for the first time I felt that she was standing on the earth. The strange thing is that the one who worked that miracle was a man.

My friend went on talking about him, and it delighted me to hear every one of her whispers.

She said that he is a stranger, exactly like her, and this was the first step that brought them together... Then too, he does not talk much about himself... He tried to enter the folds of her soul without using the embroidered phrases of courtship and the empty, ornate talk; and without searching through her past days and recording the history of her steps.

He wanted her as she is: a woman who errs and gets it right, who loves and hates, who resents and forgives, who rages and grows calm, who adorns her body as she adorns her mind.

And the man my friend told me of wanted more than all that... He wanted her to go on with her work, and he set about parting the veils that swathed her soul, so that it might open and stand bare before the face of light and truth... He told her that with her own eyelids she had woven her name — so let her keep, as his wife, her own name. Then he whispered in her ear: I do not believe that marriage is a matter of one person's possessing another; it is a piece of music in which two instruments play, each one by itself, and together they bring forth a single melody — with tenderness in it, and giving, and harmony.

And I asked of my friend only one thing — that I might present her companion as the picture of the month.