“Nothing is really new,” replied Féraz—“but, such as it is, it is my own invention.”
“Then you are a poet and musician at one and the same time,” said Irene. “It seems a natural combination of gifts, yet the two do not always go together. I hope”—she now addressed herself to El-Râmi—“I hope very much you will come and see me, though I’m afraid I’m not a very popular person. My friends are few, so I cannot promise you much entertainment. Indeed, as a rule, people do not like me.”
“I like you!” said Féraz, quickly and impulsively.
She smiled.
“Yes? That is good of you. And I believe you, for you are too unworldly to deal in flatteries. But I assure you that, generally speaking, literary women are never social favourites.”
“Not even when they are lovely like you?” questioned Féraz, with simple frankness.
She coloured at the evident sincerity of his admiration and the boyish openness with which it was thus expressed. Then she laughed a little.
“Loveliness is not acknowledged as at all existent in literary females,” she replied lightly, yet with a touch of scorn,—“even if they do possess any personal charm, it only serves as a peg for the malicious to hang a slander on. And, of the two sexes, men are most cruel to a woman who dares to think for herself.”
“Are you sure of that, Madame?” asked El-Râmi gently. “May not this be an error of your judgment?”
“I would that it were!” she said with intense expression—“Heaven knows how sincerely I should rejoice to be proved wrong! But I am not wrong. Men always judge women as their inferiors, not only physically (which they are) but mentally (which they are not), and always deny them an independent soul and independent emotions,—the majority of men, indeed, treat them pretty much as a sort of superior cattle;—but, nevertheless, there is a something in what the French call ‘L’Éternel Féminin.’ Women are distinctly the greatest sufferers in all suffering creation,—and I have often thought that for so much pain and so much misjudgment, endured often with such heroic silence and uncomplaining fortitude, the compensation will be sweeter and more glorious than we, half drowned in our own tears, can as yet hope for, or imagine!”