Page:Princess Badoura, a tale from the Arabian nights.djvu/16

4 form. With the story of Badoura, the woman of beauty and brain, who, personating her husband, ruled a Kingdom, and without jealousy provided him at the end of his wanderings with a second wife—in this story Scheherazade, her great act of statesmanship concluded, adumbrates what woman set free to use her own resources can do. And in this reflection of her own great adventurous self the series concludes. Through a thousand dim dawns, with the issue still in doubt, she has led the forlorn hope for all the other women whose lives she would save; and when her tyrant relents, and in his promise to spare her life spares theirs as well, she kneels and gratefully kisses his feet.