They never, I
think, wore the yashmak properly fixed. When they first saw me
they used to hold up a part of their drapery with one hand across
their faces, but they seldom persevered very steadily in subjecting
me to this privation. Unhappy beings! they were sadly plain. The
awful haggardness that gave something of character to the faces of
the men was sheer ugliness in the poor women. It is a great shame,
but the truth is that, except when we refer to the beautiful
devotion of the mother to her child, all the fine things we say and
think about woman apply only to those who are tolerably good-
looking or graceful. These Arab women were so plain and clumsy,
that they seemed to me to be fit for nothing but another and a
better world. They may have been good women enough so far as
relates to the exercise of the minor virtues, but they had so
grossly neglected the prime duty of looking pretty in this
transitory life, that I could not at all forgive them. They seemed
to feel the weight of their guilt, and to be truly and humbly
penitent. I had the complete command of their affections, for at
any moment I could make their young hearts bound and their old
hearts jump by offering a handful of tobacco, and yet, believe me,
it was not in the first soiree that my store of Latakia was
exhausted.
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