A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan
on tie head before she got rid of him; I could not help feeling
a secret admiration for anyone brave enough to do so. As
for Kerim, he was as wax in her hands. He retired after lunch
into the yard where the old Tartar had relegated bis own
mother among the servants. The two ladies sat on in the
best room, one on each side of me, and explained how they
were Christians in all but name. They hated Luristan, and
hoped to wean Kerim from his delight in living with his own
tribe on what was left of his land; they liked to live in a town,
and had friends among the missionaries. " They taught me
that love is all that matters in the world," said the mother-in-
law, with her two grandchildren on her knee; " and you
cannot think how I love these children; all except that one
over there," she added, nodding towards the eldest little girl
who sat neglected in one corner: " I cannot bear her."
This peculiar interpretation of Christian precept roused me
to some mild protest; I think I said it was hard on the little
third girl. A glassy look appeared in the lady's heavy-lidded
eyes. " That is love," she remarked shortly; " it comes and
goes as it wills." And that was that.
As a Christian convert, the mother-in-law must have been
distinctly embarrassing. I have never seen anyone with
quite her uncompromising brutality. She had a pretty young
stepdaughter of seventeen in the house, whom she had
snatched from the school in Hamadan where the American
Mission was educating her, and whom she now kept as a
servant, never allowing her to come into the best room, to
sit with us at meals, or to have any dealings at all with her own
sort: no husband was going to be found for her, so that the
child had nothing but a life of oppression and drudgery to
look forward to, with no escape. She spoke good English,
and told me her troubles that night when she took me down
into the stable to have a hot bath; but I was never able tc
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