“Please Allah, no!” cried the old woman, a trifle vexed at being brought to earth. “Thou wilt be still quite youthful. See thee now: what beauty, what a youthful figure! By Allah, almost wicked in a mother! Thou dost not grow old.”

In fact, her shape, though something fat, was not ungainly, like that of younger women leading the same life. She took no care of it, conforming to the harem custom for women who bear children to let beauty go. “The time and purpose of the bloom is past, the fruit succeeds, more noble,” they assured her. She saw the rarest beauties, like Bedr-ul-Budûr, already changing into fat old women. Compared with them she felt still young and comely. But when, her carriage rolling on the Gîzah road, she saw real Frankish women, riding, driving, she felt a raddled and unwieldy hag. There was one Englishwoman in particular who often passed her, driving a light dogcart with a Nubian groom behind⁠—straight as a lance and trim of waist, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes under grizzled hair. A creature of free air and open sunlight, the shuttered, perfumed shade could not produce her like. A jealousy near hatred stirred in Barakah.