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Pennsylvania, and that she would rather die on the sands of the desert than marry the young man from that town who had been courting her.”
    “Is Dorset so bad?” the old Afghan asked. “I knew many small towns in France, and they weren’t exciting, but they weren’t bad, either.”
    “I used to drive out to Dorset,” Moheb Khan replied. “I remember it as a lovely American town. Rather colonial in architecture, I recall.”
    “But you didn’t live there,” the old man reflected.
    “As a matter of fact, I did,” Moheb corrected. “For three days. Ellen and Nazrullah drove me up one Friday afternoon. He wanted the Jaspars to see that in Afghanistan we had many young men who spoke well. It was an agonizing weekend.”
    “The Jaspars took the whole thing rather dimly?” I asked.
    Moheb was about to reply when I received the distinct sensation that some additional person had entered the room. A presence of some kind seemed to hover near me in the heavy battle-room and I thought I saw old Shah Khan looking over my shoulder and shaking his head. I turned in the direction of whoever it was who might be receiving the message, and there was no one. But I did see something I had not noticed when I first arrived in the room. In the hallway, thrown across a chair as an American child might throw her raincoat, lay a fawn-colored chaderi.
    “Dimly?” Moheb was echoing. “The Jaspars looked at Nazrullah and me as if we had leprosy.”
    “What did Mr. Jaspar work at?” I asked. “Wasn’t it insurance?”
    “Yes. He had that sweet, affable nature that insurance men around the world acquire,” Moheb replied. “I liked him, and his wife was equally pleasant. He was also chairman, I believe, of the local draft board. A position of responsibility.”
    “Later on,” Shah Khan inquired, “didn’t you advise the Jaspars against an Afghan marriage?”
    “Yes. I met them in Philadelphia, and I brought along our ambassador from Washington, and the four of us … Nazrullah and Ellen knew nothingof this meeting and did not attend. We discussed the matter quite frankly.”
    “You told them the truth?” I asked.
    “Completely. As I recall, our ambassador was rather unhappy and thought the explicitness of my explanation unnecessary. Told me later I might have damaged our nation’s reputation. I told the Jaspars that if their daughter married Nazrullah, when she reached Kabul her American passport would be taken away and she could never thereafter leave Afghanistan, no matter what the excuse, without her husband’s permission. That she was an Afghan then and forever, and that she surrendered all claim to protection from America.”
    “You told them that as clearly as you are telling me?” Shah Khan asked.
    “Yes.”
    “What did they say?”
    “Mrs. Jaspar began to cry.”
    “Did you warn them about Afghan salaries and living conditions?” I asked.
    “I did. Most explicitly,” Moheb assured me. “I said, ‘Mr. Jaspar, Ellen mustn’t be deceived by the fact that in America Nazrullah drives a Cadillac and I a Mercedes. Our government is very generous to us as long as we’re abroad, but when we go home Nazrullah and I will get jobs that pay no more than twenty American dollars a month.’”
    “Did they believe you?”
    “They saw the cars and were sure I was lying. In Dorset, Pennsylvania, as in Kabul, cupidity is the same. The Jaspars were convinced that Nazrullah was very rich.”
    “What does he earn now?” I asked.
    The Khans conversed in Pashto and agreed that Nazrullah and his American bride had begun with a salary of twenty-one dollars a month and that it had now grown to twenty-seven, more or less.
    “And I explained the housing,” Moheb continued. “I said that for much of her life Ellen would live in a hovel, surrounded by women who despised her for not wearing the chaderi …”
    “Is it true, Your Excellency,” I asked, “that Afghanistan may soon discard the chaderi?”
    The old man leaned