the attar, which I had obtained at Stamboul. My
admiration of her patience and pleasure in her success deeply
gratified her; and it was a full reward for all her trouble when I
suggested that she should send to her sister Zevle a small packet of
each of the seeds with which she had succeeded. It happened, however,
that the few rose seeds had all been planted; and the flowers, though
apparently perfect, produced no seed of their own, probably because
they were not suited to the taste of the flower-birds, and Eveena
somehow forgot or failed to employ the process of artificial
fertilisation.

If anything could have fully reconciled my conscience to the household
relations in which I was rather by weakness than by will inextricably
entangled, it would have been the certainty that by the sacrifice
Eveena had herself enforced on me, and which she persistently refused
to recognise as such, she alone had suffered. True that I could not
give, and could hardly affect for the wives bestowed on me by
another's choice, even such love as the head of a Moslem household may
distribute among as many inmates. But to what I could call love they
had never looked forward. But for the example daily presented before
their own eyes they would no more have missed than they comprehended
it. That they were happier than they had expected, far happier than
they would have been in an ordinary home, happier certainly than in
the schools they had quitted, I could not doubt, and they did not
affect to deny. If my patience were not proof against vexations the
more exasperating from their pettiness, and the sense of ridicule
which constantly attached to them, I could read in the manner of most
and understand from the words of Eunane, who seldom hesitated to speak
her mind, whether its utterances, were flattering or wounding, that
she and her companions found me not only far more indulgent, but
incomparably more just than they had been taught to hope a man could
be. Of justice, indeed, as consisting in restraint on one's own temper
and consideration for the temper of others, Martial manhood is
incapable, or, at any rate, Martial womanhood never suspects its
masters.

Moreover, though no longer blest with the spirits of youth, and
finding little pleasure in what youth calls pleasure, I had escaped
the kind of satiety that seems to attend lives more softly spent than
mine had been; and found a very real and unfading enjoyment in
witnessing the keen enjo