Passport. And we are exceeding sorry we can not tell you anything about the colour and size of Najma’s eyes; the shape and curves of her brows and lips; the tints and shades in her cheeks; and the exact length of her figure and hair. Shakib leaves us in the dark about these essentials, and we must needs likewise leave you. Our Scribe thinks he has said everything when he speaks of her as a houri. But this paradisal title among our Arabic writers and verse-makers is become worse than the Sultan’s Medjidi decorations. It is bestowed alike on every drab and trollop as on the very few who really deserve it. Let us rank it, therefore, with the Medjidi decorations and pass on.
But Khalid, who has seen enough of the fair, would not be attracted to Najma, enchanted by her, if she were not endowed with such of the celestial treasures as rank above the visible lines of beauty.
Our Scribe speaks of the “purity and naivete of her soul as purest sources of felicity and inspiration.”
Indeed, if she were not constant in love, she would not have spurned the many opportunities in the absence of Khalid; and had she not a fine discerning sense of real worth, she would not have surrendered herself to her poor ostracised cousin; and if she were not intuitively, preternaturally wise, she would not marry an enemy of the Jesuits, a bearer withal of infiltrated lungs and a shrunken windpipe.
“There is a great advantage in having a sickly husband,” she once said to Shakib, “it lessons a woman in the heavenly virtues of our Virgin Mother, in patient endurance and pity, in charity, magnanimity, and pure love.”
What, with these sublimities of character, need we know of her visible charms, or lack of them? She might deserve the title Shakib bestows upon her; she might be a real houri, for all we know?