“Well,” said I at last, “have you any fault to find with my reasoning or my simile?”

“With your simile—­none.  It is faultlessly perfect.  You have not mixed up your metaphors in the least.  Crib, stocks, ocean, ship—­all correct, and very nautical.  As for your reasoning, I do not believe there is anything in it.  I do not believe that pleasure leads to happiness; I do not believe that a woman has a soul, and I deny the whole argument from beginning to end.  There,” he added with a smile that belied the brusqueness of his words, “that is my position.  Talk me out of it if you can; the night is long, and my patience as that of the ass.”

“I do not think this is a case for rigid application of logic.  When the feelings are concerned—­and where can they be more concerned than in our intercourse with women?—­the only way to arrive at any conclusion is by a sort of trying-on process, imagining ourselves in the position indicated, and striving to fancy how it would suit us.  Let us begin in that way.  Suppose yourself unmarried, your three wives and their children removed—­”

“Allah in his mercy grant it!” ejaculated Isaacs with great fervour.

“—­removed from the question altogether.  Then imagine yourself thrown into daily conversation with some beautiful woman who has read what you have read, thought what you have thought, and dreamed the dreams of a nobler destiny that have visited you in waking and sleeping hours.  A woman who, as she learned your strange story, should weep for the pains you suffered and rejoice for the difficulties overcome, who should understand your half spoken thoughts and proudly sympathise in your unuttered aspirations; in whom you might see the twin nature to your own, and detect the strong spirit and the brave soul, half revealed through the feminine gentleness and modesty that clothe her as with a garment.  Imagine all this, and then suppose it lay in your power, was a question of choice, for you to take her hand in yours and go through life and death together, till death seem life for the joy of being united for ever.  Suppose you married her—­not to lock her up in an indolent atmosphere of rosewater, narghyles, and sweetmeats, to die of inanition or to pester you to death with complaints and jealousies and inopportune caresses; but to be with you and help your life when you most need help, by word and thought and deed, to grow more and more a part of you, an essential element of you in action or repose, to part from which would be to destroy at a blow the whole fabric of your existence.  Would you not say that with such a woman the transitory pleasure of early conversation and intercourse had been the stepping-stone to the lasting happiness of such a friendship as you could never hope for in your old age among your sex?  Would not her faithful love and abounding sympathy be dearer to you every day, though the roses in her cheek should fade and the bright hair whiten with the dust of life’s journey?  Would you not feel that when you died your dearest wish must be to join her where there should be no parting—­her from whom there could be no parting here, short of death itself?  Would you not believe she had a soul?”