melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency to
muse she grew indignant.

"Of what mud are you building castles now? Set down my thoughts
not yours," she insisted, "if your tale is to be worth the pesa."

By that she referred to the custom of all Eastern story-tellers to stop at
the exciting moment and take up a collection of the country's smallest
copper coins before finishing the tale. But the reference was double-edged.
A penny for my thoughts, a penny for the West's interpretation of the
East was what she had in mind.

Nevertheless, as it is to the West that the story must appeal it has seemed
wiser to remove it from her lips and so transpose that, though it loses
in lore unfortunately, it does gain something of directness and simplicity.
Her satire, and most of her metaphor if always set down as she phrased it,
would scandalize as well as puzzle Western ears.

This tale is of her youth, but Yasmini's years have not yet done more
than ripen her. In a land where most women shrivel into early age she
continues, somewhere perhaps a little after thirty, in the bloom of health
and loveliness, younger in looks and energy than many a Western girl
of twenty-five. For she is of the East and West, very terribly endowed
with all the charms of either and the brains of both.

Her quick wit can detect or invent mercurial Asian subterfuge as swiftly
as appraise the rather glacial drift of Western thought; and the wisdom
of both East and West combines in her to teach a very nearly total
incredulity in human virtue. Western morals she regards as humbug,
neither more nor less.