Of the state of Mahometan society at this period we have not the materials for judging closely. Constant employment in the field, no doubt, tended to arrest the action of the depraving influences which, in times of ease and luxury, began to relax the sanctions and taint the purity of Bedouin life. But there is ample indication that the relations between the sexes were already rapidly deteriorating. The baneful influence of polygamy, especially now that it was intensified by the husband’s power of arbitrary divorce and the unlimited licence of servile concubinage, was quickened by the vast multitudes of slave-girls taken by the army, and distributed or sold, both among the soldiers and the community at large. The wife of noble blood held, under the old chivalrous code of the Arabs, a position of honour and supremacy in the household, from which she could be ousted by no base-born rival, however fair or fruitful. She was now to be, in the estimation of her husband, but one amongst many, to whose level she was gradually being lowered. If his slave-girls bore him children, they became at once, as _Omm Walad_, free;[410] and in point of legitimacy and inheritance the offspring was equal to the children of the free and noble wife. Beauty and blandishment began to outshine birth and breeding, and the favourite of the hour too often displaced her noble mistress. [Sidenote: Story of the Princess Leila.] With the coarse sensualist, revelling like Moghîra in a harem well stocked with Greek and Persian captives, this might have been expected. But it was not the less the case in many a household of greater refinement and repute. Some lady, ravished, it may have been, from a noble home, and endowed with the charms and graces of a courtly life, would captivate her master, and for the moment rule supreme. The story of the Princess Leila will afford a sample. This beautiful daughter of Judi, the Ghassanide chief slain at Dûma, was bought by the victorious Khâlid from the common prize. The fame of her charms had already reached Medîna, and kindled a romantic flame in the breast of Abd al Rahmân, son of Abu Bekr. He was wild in his passion for her, and sang his grief in verses still preserved.[411] At last he became her happy master, and she was despatched from the camp to his home. At once he freed her, and took her to wife. His love for this lady was so great that, forsaking all other, he kept him only to her--so long as her beauty lasted. She was the queen of his household. But after a time she fell sick and began to waste away. The beauty went, and with it her master’s love; and so her turn, too, came to be forsaken. Then his comrades said to him: ‘Why thus keep her on, neglected and forsaken here? Suffer her to go back to her people and her home.’ So he suffered her. Leila’s fate was happy compared with that of others. Tired of his toy, the owner would sell her to become, if still young