Margaret's ears caught the sound of water. It was coming from a tall fountain which was playing in the centre of the outer hall. Above it was a pendentive roof, richly carved and coloured. A suggestion of turquoise-blue and the gleam of iridescent tiles showed through the clear water in the octagonal basin set in the floor. The jets of water came from a large ball of blue faience resting on the top of a slender spiral column. The fountain was only one of the beautiful features of that Eastern mansion which Margaret noticed as her hostess conducted her to the inner courtyard.
"How enchanting it all is!" Margaret said. "I feel much too prosaic to imagine spending my everyday working hours in it." Her life in the hut seemed better suited to her practical nature.
"I love it," Hadassah said. "And I like its emptiness. That is the native idea. We have tried not to make it look like a mediaeval museum, not to stuff it up with things. It's a great temptation."
"Its sense of space is its greatest charm. There is everything you can possibly want in it, and yet it has none of the absurd knick-knacks and useless lumber of Western houses. My brother and I have learned to do without so much that I don't think we shall ever fall into the sin of overcrowding our rooms again."
Hadassah laughed. "Will you have the courage to burn family relics?—Aunt Maria's uncomfortable ottoman, Aunt Elizabeth's escritoire, which is too small to write at, and Aunt Anne's firescreen with strawberries worked in bead-work?"
"Oh, I know them all," Margaret said. "Just compare them to these beautiful things!"
"Don't forget," Hadassah said, "that you are comparing the things of England's worst period to the things of the finest period in Cairo. If you saw some of the native houses, furnished from the European store in the Ezbekiyeh, you would think Queen Victoria's private apartments at Osborne beautiful," Hadassah's voice expressed her meaning.
"Good-bye," Margaret said laughingly. "It is hard to believe that, but
I take your word for it."
As Margaret walked through the outer courtyard, she kept saying to herself, "So that is the Syrian's daughter, the girl whom the English people rejected and would have none of!"
Freddy had often corrected his sister for her careless use of the word "beautiful." He maintained that few people had ever seen a really beautiful human being. The Greeks idealized their models in their types of Venus and Apollo. Margaret felt that at last she could truthfully tell him that she had seen a beautiful woman, and that that woman was a Syrian, Michael Ireton's "wife out of Egypt."