and forbearance could have made the lessons otherwise than painful to us both.  Well for me that the “right to govern wrong” was to her a simple truth—­an inalienable marital privilege, to be met with that unqualified submission which must have shamed the worst temper into self-control.  Eive on one occasion made a similar request; but besides that I realised the convenience of a medium of communication understood by ourselves alone, I had no inclination to expose either my own temper or Eive’s to the trial.  Eveena’s second request came naturally from one whose favourite amusement had been the raising and modification of flowers.  She asked to be entrusted with the charge of the seeds I had brought from Earth, and to be permitted to form a bed in the peristyle for the purpose of the experiment.  Though this disfigured the perfect arrangement of the garden, I was delighted to have so important and interesting a problem worked out by hands so skilful and so careful.  I should probably have failed to rear a single plant, even had I been familiar with those applications of electricity to the purpose which are so extensively employed in Mars.  Eveena managed to produce specimens strangely altered, sometimes stunted, sometimes greatly improved, from about one-fourth of the seeds entrusted to her; and among those with which she was most brilliantly successful were some specimens of Turkish roses, the roses of the attar, which I had obtained at Stamboul.  My admiration of her patience and pleasure in her success deeply gratified her; and it was a full reward for all her trouble when I suggested that she should send to her sister Zevle a small packet of each of the seeds with which she had succeeded.  It happened, however, that the few rose seeds had all been planted; and the flowers, though apparently perfect, produced no seed of their own, probably because they were not suited to the taste of the flower-birds, and Eveena somehow forgot or failed to employ the process of artificial fertilisation.

If anything could have fully reconciled my conscience to the household relations in which I was rather by weakness than by will inextricably entangled, it would have been the certainty that by the sacrifice Eveena had herself enforced on me, and which she persistently refused to recognise as such, she alone had suffered.  True that I could not give, and could hardly affect for the wives bestowed on me by another’s choice, even such love as the head of a Moslem household may distribute among as many inmates.  But to what I could call love they had never looked forward.  But for the example daily presented before their own eyes they would no more have missed than they comprehended it.  That they were happier than they had expected, far happier than they would have been in an ordinary home, happier certainly than in the schools they had quitted, I could not doubt, and they did not affect to deny.  If my patience were not proof against vexations the more exasperating from their pettiness,