provinces and even into the Sudan.

I have a vivid memory of being taken one morning to a street in the old quarter of Cairo and searching for a sign in Arabic which meant the "Girls' Club of the New Woman," which is really a school to prepare poor girls to earn a living. An old carved doorway admitted us to a large courtyard where a modern playground apparatus had been installed. The large house, a decayed old palace belonging, I believe, to one of the wealthy members, was given over to various classes of instruction in stenography and in applied arts suitable for girls. Rug-weaving, embroidery, dressmaking, lace-making, and household work were taught to them. A proportion of the day was allotted for mental education, when the girls were taught all the elementary branches, as well as simple hygiene, such as the care of teeth, eyes, skin, and hair according to modern standards. About 150 girls at a time can be educated, and half of them are boarders.

The active secretary of this school of La Femme Nouvelle is Mme. Gameela Abbia. She explained that the money for the organization work came from dues and yearly subscriptions. These varied, according to the size of a member's pocket-book, from one dollar a year to a thousand dollars or more. Both democracy and coöperation were thus shown here. The president of La Femme Nouvelle is the wife of Dr. Mahmoud Bey Sidky. Her task is a combination of the presidential responsibilities of The National Woman's Federated Clubs, The Woman's City Club of New York, Chicago, or Boston, with The Child Welfare Association and a few hospital boards thrown in.

The native press, indifferent and often hostile to the new woman, gives no idea of what she is doing, much less thinking. The actions of the feminine population is not "news."

During this conversation, which might have occurred in any drawingroom of the upper class in any European nation, I heard through an open door strains of last year's jazz music. A group of a dozen of the younger set had collected in the music-room, where the tea-table was placed. They were all in French clothes, with a tendency to bright colors and heavy velvets. They all spoke Arabic and French, and most of them Italian and English. They do charity and club work and even dabble in politics. They gossip and go to the movies. They ride and play tennis. They bathe in the sea and go picnicking. They dance and flirt with one another's younger brothers and "cousins." Male relatives are admitted to home festivities, and the blood relationship is becoming more attenuated from a social point of view.

§ 5

When a man of the middle or lower classes takes a wife, he pays her father so much for being deprived of her services; and if he divorces the woman, she goes back to her father with one and a half that sum, “in payment for the pleasure and profit the man has had."

A Moslem girl rarely sees her fiancé before marriage. The match is arranged by her parents. Therefore the principal contracting parties may find serious inharmonies, and the easy divorce makes this bearable; but it is often kinder for a man to take a second wife than to divorce his first, thereby depriving her of his financial support.

If she is wealthy, there are the marriage settlements by which the property remains under the exclusive control of the woman, whether as wife or divorced. This is a Mohammedan law. Other laws not unfavorable to women are that, in the event of divorce, the children may remain with the mother or mother's mother until, in case of a boy, the age of seven, or of a girl, the age of nine, when the law allows the father to claim them. But if he has married again and has children, the maternal grandmother gets them.

Mlle. Sennia Riaz Pasha discussed with me sex and marriage with all the aplomb of a young college woman of America. Her ideas agreed with the assistant governor of one of the principal Nile provinces, who told me:

"While it is true that our religion permits four wives, no man can now take a second wife without justifying his action to himself and to his friends. It is against public opinion. And Mohammed, in making four wives legal, did not order that it should be so, but permitted a man to marry up to that number in order to stop immorality and promiscuity. The European man has his mistress.

The Moslem takes another wife. Is it really any different except that the Moslem is franker?"

There is yet no shop-girl class in Egypt. The Moslem new woman does not go into shops or factories. The clerks in the big foreign department-stores are Copts or foreigners, though occasionally a Coptic woman may be found as a clerk, typist, or

secretary. There are a few new woman writers, like Aziza Fawzy, a journalist, and Nabuwey a Mousa, who wrote "The Women and the Work." There are also a few women in the professions.

Still, the new woman in Egypt, gathering strength, digs persistently at the dam of ignorance, custom, and male oppression. She has become a part of the struggle for self-expression which is straining all around this spinning globe of ours. In Europe and America, then in Turkey, China, and Japan, the woman claims a part as the new order causes governments and social systems to fall or totter.

In Egypt the last representative is the present Queen Nazli, daughter of Obdurachman Pasha Sabrey, who, by inheritance at least, is one of the progressives. Her mother was a warm friend of Mme. Zaghlul Pasha. Her family is not royal, although of good Turkish descent, and young Nazli was taken to Europe and mingled with the modern set in Cairo and Alexandria until her gilded cage closed upon her in 1919 at the age of eighteen. When her Majesty granted an audience on February 22, 1922, I was greeted by a young woman of tall, graceful beauty, who spoke frankly about her desire for travel and liberty.

If not for her Majesty, surely for the new woman in Egypt, who has adopted Mme. Zaghlul's slogan, "We shall go on till the end," there can be only one answer. As elsewhere, she will win the larger freedom which she seeks not only for herself, but for her lagging sister, the other woman.

J

AKE POHL was a conductor on a surface car, Seventh Avenue, New York. The history of how he came to advance to that employment is lost in the past, along with the experiences that conspired to make the ugly scowl, the ugly temper, and the ugly tongue with which he impressed his personality upon all who by ill luck boarded his car. It may have been that his father was a plug-ugly before him; one thing was sure, it was a step up for Jake, his being a conductor on a city car. It may have been undernourishment in his youth or lack of education or thwarted ambition; we need not worry over that, for Jake Pohl was not to be pitied by any man. He had established a give and take with fate.

From the time he got up in the morning and rattled the change in the torn pockets of his old blue uniform and jammed his cap down over his eyes until he went to bed at night, Jake Pohl moved in an aura of noise and violence. You entered it when you entered his car. He yelled at you to "Come on! Git on! Step up! Step up in the car!" and saw to it that you were catapulted forward just as you paid your fare, and muttered uncomplimentary comments under his breath, but audibly, as you lurched forward to your seat. If you turned to protest, you met an ugly leer and the baleful gleam of Jake Pohl's eye.

"It would n't cost you anything, young man, to be civil."

"Nah?" Jake would sneer as he jerked the bell-rope, stamped viciously on the signal-bell under his foot, and slammed the doors to on the coat-tail of the last man in.

Now and then other "uglies" rode on his car. "Say-look-a here, young fellah, who d' yuh think ye 're talkin' tuh?" And Jake would lean out past them, holding the door open while he spat his indifference. "Move up in the car! Plenty room in the front uv

the car. Let 'em off! Let 'em off, can't yuh? Git back there! Let 'em off! Come on, now! Whad 'r' yuh standin' there fer?"

There was no wit in what he said, no cleverness; but it was Jake Pohl, the self-expression all men seek. There was for him the rare esthetic satisfaction of the man who has achieved not only the form of self-expression best suited to himself, but understood as well by those to whom it was addressed. For he had full and perfect response from his audience. When he bawled or muttered or scowled at them, they scowled and bawled and muttered in return. It was irresistible and instantaneous. Jake Pohl against the public, Jake Pohl against the world.

No matter what weighty business occupied your mind, what pleasant thoughts beguiled you, Jake Pohl com

manded the mood of his passengers. His car went up and down filled with resentment and baffled rage, and he thrived on it, as other men thrive on adulation and flattery.

It was a mystery why he was never reported for these incivilities. Perhaps he was, and the company kept him despite it. On an average, thirty ladies every day remarked as they righted themselves, or emerged from a futile argument about fares or routes, what a "horrible person" and that he "ought to be reported for that." But somehow they never did; they were always too busy. And, then, they seldom rode on the surface cars, anyway. The fact is that it was not meant that any one would report Jake, or that he would lose his job. He was, like the rest of us, bound to the wheel of his destiny.

Off duty at night, he went home to bully his wife. Yes, despite the ugly scowl, the ugly tongue, and the baleful gleam of his eye, Jake Pohl had managed himself a wife.

At any rate, there she was, a fairly good-tempered, fairly slatternly girl, who, because she was childless perhaps, kept a kind of gamin prettiness of face longer than prettiness generally endures in a basement, with coal smudges constantly hiding it and making it grotesque. But living in a basement had its advantages for Jake Pohl; his wife tended the furnace and swept the halls and answered the bell for the tenants above, so there was no rent to pay.

The poor girl was not a model of efficiency, and when Jake would come home in the evening to find supper not even begun or only on the way, he would bait and bully her while she scurried about the cluttered kitchen,

spilling and burning everything in a frenzy of excitement and haste. He cracked the whip, and she jumped, and only now and then did she turn upon him. Then there was a fine storm in the basement. "Sa-ay, who yuh talkin' to? in' to? Me?" stopping her suppergetting short. "Me?" tapping her breast with a grimy finger. "Well, yuh kin stop it, see? Yuh kin cut it out! I ain't nobody's slave! Nobody's, see? I ain't gonna stand fer no such talk. Get yer own supper! You come home an' keep up the fire! Me, I'm t'rough, see? I ain't gonna stand fer it."

And Jake, throwing in now and then a sneering "Yeah?" with a short jerk of his head, would at last take a sudden ominous step in her direction, and, his face twisted into his ugliest leer, his black eyes gleaming their balefulest, would cut in with: "That 's right! Git us put out! Think they 're gonna stand fer you yellin' like that? Whadda yuh mean?"

The wonder was that she stood for it, that she did n't leave him straight. Of course he may have had his softer moods, though surely they were not frequent enough to compensate. The fact was, I suppose, that she was fond of Jake. And then, like so many longsuffering wives, she had refuge in an inner, an ideal, life, in which her husband had no share; a life of beauty, of romance, in which her spirit daily refreshed itself. Every afternoon she would throw on an old coat over her sweater, and hatless, without even the trouble of washing her face, she would scuttle down the block and round the corner to a cheap movie-house where for an hour or two every day basement, husband, grime, were all forgotten. She loved and suffered and triumphed

with queens and princesses; she dwelt in the fabulous boudoirs of the daughters of millionaires.

Yet once in a long while the glamour would be so strong upon her that she would not be able to resist recounting the story to Jake in the pauses of getting supper, standing by the basement range and gesturing with a cooking spoon. Jake received these gratuitous entertainments with the indifferent tolerance of the superior male, but sometimes they would be of such an intensity that, despite himself, he was drawn into them, and he would sit listening to all those thrilling and dangerous and high happenings as if he were in a spell. But this weakness was paid for the moment he recovered himself. He would roar at her to hurry up with the supper, object to the food, make exceedingly uncomplimentary remarks about the length of time she'd lived and never yet a meal on time. He gave her to understand that if it had n't been for all that time she had wasted a few minutes ago, he might have had something to eat by now. He wanted his supper sometime to-night.

When she asked what his hurry was, he would say he was "goin' out"; he never said where, but his manner indicated at least a meeting of the Black Hand or the Bomb-Throwers' Guild. She sometimes wondered whether he might n't have gone out to see for himself the wonders of which she had been telling him. Once she accused him of this, at breakfast, when he had been out the night before, and all that day his passengers paid for her temerity. But life was not to be unbroken triumph even for Jake Pohl. One day a thing occurred that threatened to change the whole of life for him.

violence seemed to enter the atmosphere, as if Jake's normal violence had spread and increased and multiplied until the air was filled with it. A car appeared suddenly round the curve; a wagon lurched out of the way; a shout, a stillness, and a terrific crash; the sound of splintering glass, the crunch and split of wood, and curses in a steady stream from the mouth of Jake Pohl. There followed a second crash and lurch, and the curses ceased; then the crowd came running from all directions, closing in, filling the street. Presently the clang of an ambulance gong was heard, and Jake Pohl, bleeding and unconscious, was carried out through the crowd and stowed away in the ambulance, which clanged slowly away down a side street.