There were details she would not have chosen in her cloistered life, but on the whole it was the happiest that she had ever known. She was waited on hand and foot who had known drudgery; her husband used her as a reigning beauty who, but a few weeks since, had been esteemed uninteresting. Then there were pleasures of society. The Pasha’s carriage often came, with one or other of the ladies and Gulbeyzah, to take her round to call on grand harîms. She was received with favour by great ladies. One, a princess, by name Amînah Khânum, insisted on her spending a whole day alone with her.
This dame, though elderly, still dressed to charm. Her rooms were full of European furniture, but she herself sat always on a sofa, smoking a long, old-fashioned pipe with coral mouthpiece.
“You are not of the first rank in your own country,” she told Barakah to start with, bluntly; “or you would not be where you are. You do not know the people I have met in France and England, so don’t pretend you do. I value frankness.” It seemed she knew the English pretty thoroughly.
She spoke good French and talked of Western Europe with intelligence, seeming in general to approve its customs. One little speech of hers amazed the visitor, intruding as it did abruptly upon lighter talk:
“The Europeans have degraded love and made life banal. They spread life’s agitation over a vast surface and account it progress; we value depth and stillness. Enlarging each life’s pool, they make it shallow. A woman’s life is of the feelings which are dulled, not quickened, by extensive interests. Their men too suffer, growing superficial, flippant, without depth of character.”
When Barakah retailed this saying to Gulbeyzah, the Circassian sighed: “She knows!” and told a curious story.
It was that years ago a European officer in the Egyptian service had wooed Amînah Khânum secretly; and she had been entirely captivated by his charms. But endeavouring to sound his character, she found him shallow. She made him islam, but his carelessness informed her that conversion meant no more for him than access to her. In the same way she perceived that what he felt for her was nothing more profound than the desire to add a Muslim lady to his list of conquests. The blow was dire, for she was then extremely lovely, and a great examiner of men, having divorced or killed ten husbands. She would not have him tell a tale among his kind, yet could not conquer her intense desire of him. What could she do? She satisfied her heart, and the next morning gave him death in easy form, being well versed in poisons.
Barakah cried out in horror; but Gulbeyzah shrugged.
“What else could woman, not a harlot, do? He was an infidel, and would have bragged of her. Ever since then Amînah Khânum has a kindness for the Franks, though she deplores their levity.”
“And would you do the same?”