ther.

[C] The ordinary dress, cut rather like a dressing gown and made in
cotton or silk. If the latter, it is usually elaborately trimmed
with flounces and lace.

Her husband may be kind to her, and in many cases is; but in any case
she is his slave and utterly dependent on the caprice of his nature. If
she herself is fortunate enough to have a man who treats her humanely
there are dozens of others living in her quarter who come to see her,
who are objects of cruelty and malevolence; and so her mind is fed with
histories of intrigue and divorce, of injustice and retaliation, and of
unwritten scandal and sin; until she too, alas! becomes contaminated,
and often brings down upon herself the just wrath and harshness of one
who might have been good to her. History repeats itself: in nine cases
out of ten, she can add her tale of woe to the rest.

She bears her children and nurses them, thankful if they chance to be
boys; she has no heart nor ability to teach or train them; or joy in
keeping them clean and pretty;--she loses two, three, or more in
infancy; those who are strong survive and until they are two or three
years old, take her place in the streets, where the open-air life and
exercise become their physical salvation.

When she is over twenty, she in her turn becomes an elder woman and is
to be seen, usually with a young baby in her arms, walking in the
streets as she goes the round of seeing her friends, wailing with the
mourners at the house of death, weekly visiting the graves of her own or
her husband's relatives, and joining in the wedding festivities of those
who are going to follow in her train.

What wonder that the Moslem man often cries despairingly: "Our women are
all brutish," and has not an atom of respect for her in his heart. In
the few cases where a Moslem man speaks well of his wife, and calls her
"a good woman," he almost invariably attributes her being so to his own
foresight, and diligent insistence in keeping her wholly under his
control, limiting those who come to the house, and not letting her go
out of the house even after she has become an elder woman. Between
thirty-five and forty she is an old woman with grandchildren, and her
life quietly goes down to the grave with all the light and joy long
since gone out of it, and with a dark and hopeless future before it. A
few illustrations from the writer's personal knowledge will not perhaps
be out of place here.

Fatimah had b