the Kureisch had made as yet no serious endeavours to avenge their
humiliation at Bedr; moreover, the religious and political affairs of the
city had been regulated so that it was possible to carry on the usual
business of life in security--a security which certainly possessed no
guaranteed permanence, and which might at any moment crack beneath the
feet of those who walked thereon and plunge them back into an anarchy of
warring creeds and chiefs--still a security such as Medina had seldom
known, built up by the one strong personality within its walls.

For a few months Mahomet could live in peace among his followers,
and the interest shifts not to his religious ordinances and work of
government--these had been successfully started, and were now continuing
almost automatically--but to his domestic life and his relations with his
intimate circle of friends. As his years increased he felt the continual
need of companionship and consolation, and while he sought for advice in
government and counsel in war from such men as Abu Bekr, Ali, and Othman,
he found solace and refreshment in the ministering hands of women.

Sawda he already possessed, and her slow softness and unimaginative mind
had already begun to pall; Ayesha, with her beauty and shrewdness, her
jewel-like nature, bright and almost as hard, could lessen the continual
strain of his life, and induce by a kind of reflex action that tireless
energy of mind find body which was the secret of his power. But these
were not enough, and now he sought fresh pleasure in Haphsa, and in other
and lesser women, though he never cast away his earlier loves, still with
the same unformulated desire, to obtain some respite from the cares which
beset him, some renewal of his vivid nature, burning with self-destroying
fire.

The emotional stimulus, whose agents women were, became for him as