I spoke as my heart inspired me, saying, “You are not like a leper, Marta, even if you have dwelt among tombs, and you are not unclean, even if life has given you into the hands of the unclean. The body’s filth cannot touch the pure soul, and snow drifts cannot destroy living seeds. This life is but a threshing floor of sorrows in which souls have their adversities sifted out before they give their yield. But woe unto the spikes of grain left outside the threshing floor, for the ants of the earth will carry them away and the birds of the sky will glean them, and they shall not enter the granary of the field’s owner. You are oppressed, Marta, and the one who wronged you is the owner of mansions, the possessor of great wealth and a small soul. You have been wronged and scorned, but it is better for a human being to be oppressed than to be an oppressor, and more virtuous to be a martyr to the weakness of earthly impulses than to be a powerful person who crushes the flowers of life in his grasp and disfigures the noblest of emotions by his lusts.

“The soul, Marta, is a golden ring detached from the chain of divinity. Intense fire assays this ring and transforms its appearance, effacing the beauty of its roundness; but it cannot dissolve the gold into some other element, and only succeeds in burnishing it. Woe to the chaff, however, if the fire comes and devours it, reducing it to ash, which the winds scatter upon the face of the desert . . . Marta, you are a flower crushed beneath the feet of animals in human guise. Those soles trampled upon you cruelly, but could not conceal your fragrance, which ascended with the cries of the widows and the wailing of orphans and the sighs of the poor to heaven, the source of justice and mercy. Take comfort that you are a crushed flower and not a trampling foot.”

I was talking and she was listening, and my consoling words illumined her pallid face the way the gentle rays of the setting sun light up the interior of clouds. She gestured to me that I should sit next to the bed. I did so, scrutinizing her features, which spoke of the woeful mysteries of her soul, the features of one who knew she was dying; the features of a girl in the springtime of her life who sensed death’s footfalls about her shabby bed; the features of a woman abandoned who yesterday walked among the splendid valleys of Lebanon filled with life and power, who today awaited, haggard and wasted, her release from the chains of life.