“The diversions of the women,” answered Pekuah, “were only childish play, by which the mind, accustomed to stronger operations, could not be kept busy.  I could do all which they delighted in doing by powers merely sensitive, while my intellectual faculties were flown to Cairo.  They ran, from room to room, as a bird hops, from wire to wire, in his cage.  They danced for the sake of motion, as lambs frisk in a meadow.  One sometimes pretended to be hurt, that the rest might be alarmed; or hid herself, that another might seek her.  Part of their time passed in watching the progress of light bodies, that floated on the river, and part, in marking the various forms into which clouds broke in the sky.

“Their business was only needlework in which I and my maids, sometimes helped them; but you know that the mind will easily straggle from the fingers, nor will you suspect that captivity and absence from Nekayah could receive solace from silken flowers.

“Nor was much satisfaction to be hoped from their conversation:  for of what could they be expected to talk?  They had seen nothing; for they had lived, from early youth, in that narrow spot:  of what they had not seen they could have no knowledge, for they could not read.  They had no ideas but of the few things that were within their view, and had hardly names for any thing but their clothes and their food.  As I bore a superiour character, I was often called to terminate their quarrels, which I decided as equitably as I could.  If it could have amused me to hear the complaints of each against the rest, I might have been often detained by long stories; but the motives of their animosity were so small, that I could not listen without intercepting the tale.”

“How,” said Rasselas, “can the Arab, whom you represented as a man of more than common accomplishments, take any pleasure in his seraglio, when it is filled only with women like these?  Are they exquisitely beautiful?”

“They do not,” said Pekuah, “want that unaffecting and ignoble beauty, which may subsist without sprightliness or sublimity, without energy of thought, or dignity of virtue.  But to a man, like the Arab, such beauty was only a flower, casually plucked, and carelessly thrown away.  Whatever pleasures he might find among them, they were not those of friendship or society.  When they were playing about him, he looked on them with inattentive superiority:  when they vied for his regard, he sometimes turned away disgusted.  As they had no knowledge, their talk could take nothing from the tediousness of life; as they had no choice, their fondness, or appearance of fondness, excited in him neither pride nor gratitude; he was not exalted in his own esteem by the smiles of a woman, who saw no other man, nor was much obliged by that regard, of which he could never know the sincerity, and which he might often perceive to be exerted, not so much to delight him, as to pain a rival.  That which he gave, and they received, as love, was only a careless distribution of superfluous time, such love as man can bestow upon that which he despises, such as has neither hope nor fear, neither joy nor sorrow.”