And for the first time the Adulteress dared to look in the face of her liberator. She did not understand His words. What she had done was evidently a sin in His eyes because he commanded her to “sin no more”; and yet he had so acted that the others did not condemn her. And now He also did not wish to condemn her. What man was this so different from all the others, who hated sin but forgave the sinner? She would have wished to turn to Him with a question, to murmur a word of thanks, to reward Him at least with a smile, because her soul was weak and her lips beautiful. But Jesus had begun again to write on the ground of the court, His head lowered, and she saw only the silky waves of His hair shining in the sun, and His finger moving slowly over the sunlit earth. THE SINNER But no woman loved Him so much as the woman who anointed Him with nard and bathed Him with her tears in the house of Simon the Pharisee. Every one of us has seen that picture in imagination; the weeping woman with her hair falling over the feet of the Wanderer; and yet the true meaning of the episode is understood by very few, so greatly has it been disfigured by both the ordinary and the literary interpretations. The decadents of the last century, careful workmen in lascivious preciosity, who swarm to the scent of corruption like flies to filth and crows to carrion, have sought out in the Gospel those women who are redolent of sin. And they have made such women their own, adorning them with the velvet of adjectives, the silk of verbs, the jewelry and precious stones of metaphors; the unknown repentant woman, named Mary Magdalene, the unknown adulteress of Jerusalem, Salome the dancer, the sinister Herodias. The episode of this anointing has been profoundly misrepresented by such writers. It is simpler and infinitely more profound. The praise of Jesus for the woman who brought Him nard is not praise of carnal sin, or of common love as it is commonly understood by men.