She was a mystery to them.
She minded poverty so little. She was as content on a draught of water and a bunch of cress as others are on rarest meats and wines. She bore bodily fatigue with an Arab's endurance and indifference. She seemed to care little whether suns beat on her, or storms drenched her to the bone; whether she slept under a roof or the boughs of a tree; whether the people hissed her for a foreign thing of foul omen, or clamored aloud in the streets praise of her perfect face. She cared nothing.
She was silent always, and she never smiled.
"I must keep my liberty!" she had said; and she kept it.
By night she toiled ceaselessly for her new masters; docile, patient, enduring, laborious, bearing the yoke of this labor as she had borne that of her former slavery, rather than owe a crust to alms, a coin to the gaze of a crowd. But by day she searched the city ceaselessly and alone, wandering, wandering, wandering, always on a quest that was never ended. For amidst the millions of faces that met her gaze, Arslàn's was not; and she was too solitary, too ignorant, and locked her secret too tenaciously in her heart, to be able to learn tidings of his name.
So the months of the spring and the summer time went by; it was very strange and wondrous to her.
The human world seemed suddenly all about her; the quiet earth, on which the cattle grazed, and the women threshed and plowed, and the sheep browsed the thyme, and the mists swept from stream to sea, this was all gone; and in its stead there was a world of tumult, color, noise, change, riot, roofs piled on roofs, clouds of dust yellow in the sun, walls peopled with countless heads of flowers and of women; throngs, various of hue as garden-beds of blown anemones; endless harmonies and discords always rung together from silver bells, and brazen trumpets, and the clash of arms, and the spray of waters, and the screams of anguish, and the laughs of mirth, and the shrill pipes of an endless revelry, and the hollow sighs of a woe that had no rest.
For the world of a great city, of "the world as it is man's," was all about her; and she loathed it, and sickened in it, and hid her face from it whenever she could, and dreamed, as poets dream in fever of pathless seas and tawny fields of weeds, and dim woods filled with the song of birds, and cool skies brooding over a purple moor, and all the silence and the loveliness and the freedom of "the world as it is God's."
"You are not happy?" one man said to her.
"Happy!"