9 Preface وَقالَتِ امرَأَتُ فِرعَونَ قُرَّتُ عَينٍ لي وَلَكَ ۖ لا تَقتُلوهُ عَسىٰ أَن يَنفَعَنا أَو نَتَّخِذَهُ وَلَدًا وَهُم لا يَشعُرونَYusuf AliThe wife of Pharaoh said: “(Here is) joy of the eye,1 for me and for thee: slay him not. It may be that he will be use to us, or we may adopt him as a son.” And they perceived not (what they were doing)!2He was a darling to look at, and Pharaoh had apparently no son, but only a daughter, who afterwards irone. This is on the supposition that the Pharaoh was Thothmes I (see Appendix 4, S. 7).In all life Providence so orders things that Evil is defeated by its own weapons. Not only is it defeated, but it actually, though unwittingly, advances the cause of Good! In non-religious language this is called the work of the Ironic Fates. If Thomas Hardy had not made Napoleon the Puppet of Fate in his “Dynasts”, he could well have taken Pharaoh as an illustration of the Irony of Fate, or, as we should prefer to call it, the working of the Universal Plan of God. (R).