d then suppose it lay in your power, was a
question of choice, for you to take her hand in yours and go through
life and death together, till death seem life for the joy of being
united for ever. Suppose you married her--not to lock her up in an
indolent atmosphere of rosewater, narghyles, and sweetmeats, to die of
inanition or to pester you to death with complaints and jealousies and
inopportune caresses; but to be with you and help your life when you
most need help, by word and thought and deed, to grow more and more a
part of you, an essential element of you in action or repose, to part
from which would be to destroy at a blow the whole fabric of your
existence. Would you not say that with such a woman the transitory
pleasure of early conversation and intercourse had been the
stepping-stone to the lasting happiness of such a friendship as you
could never hope for in your old age among your sex? Would not her
faithful love and abounding sympathy be dearer to you every day, though
the roses in her cheek should fade and the bright hair whiten with the
dust of life's journey? Would you not feel that when you died your
dearest wish must be to join her where there should be no parting--her
from whom there could be no parting here, short of death itself? Would
you not believe she had a soul?"

"There is no end of your 'supposing,' but it is quite pretty. I am half
inclined to 'suppose' too." He took a sip of sherbet from the tall
crystal goblet the servant had placed on a little three-legged stool
beside him, and as he drank the cool liquid slowly, looked over the
glass into my eyes, with a curious, half earnest, half smiling glance; I
could not tell whether my enthusiastic picture of conjugal bliss amused
him or attracted him, so I waited for him to speak again.

"Now that you have had your cruise in your ship of happiness on the
waters of your cerulean imagination, permit me, who am land-born and a
lover of the chase, to put my steed at a few fences in the difficult
country of unadorned facts over which I propose to hunt the wily fox,
matrimony. I have never hunted a fox, but I can quite well imagine what
it is like.

"In the first place, it is all very well to suppose that it had pleased
Allah in his goodness to relieve me of my three incumbrances--meanwhile,
there they are, and they are very real difficulties I assure you.
Nevertheless are there means provided us by the foresight of the
apostle, by which we may ease